[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, what WordPress and Drupal have in common.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Chris Reynolds. Chris is a developer advocate at Pantheon, where he brings nearly 20 years of experience in the WordPress community, as well as deep involvement with Drupal and open source technology at large. Prior to his advocacy role, he worked at some of the top WordPress agencies like Human Made and Web Dev Studios. He’s been active at events like DrupalCon, PressConf, and Word Camps.

In this episode we set aside the usual WordPress only focus, and turn our attention to two CMSs, WordPress and Drupal. What makes them tick, where they excel and where they might have something to learn from each other.

Chris draws on his unique perspective working closely with both platforms as Pantheon is one of the few hosts with a 50 50 split between WordPress and Drupal sites, and has a significant footprint in both ecosystems.

We discuss the similarities and differences between the two open source CMS communities, from the mechanics of flagship events like WordCamps and DrupalCon, to the ways these projects organize their contributors and support community initiatives.

Chris explains how Drupal’s model with its association run funding, and project governance, compares to WordPress’s approach, including how each community approaches plugin and module development, and what role agencies and companies play in contributing to Core and the broader ecosystem.

If you’re curious about how open source projects organize themselves, how their communities navigate growth and challenge, and what WordPress can learn from Drupal, and vice versa, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Chris Reynolds.

I am joined on the podcast today by Chris Reynolds. Hello Chris.

[00:03:20] Chris Reynolds: Hi. How’s it going?

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: You cannot see, dear listener, what I can see. Chris has the most amazing setup where he’s doing the recording. I guess it’s an attic or something like that, but it looks like the Starship Enterprise from where I’m sitting.

[00:03:34] Chris Reynolds: I’m working on that.

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really nice. Chris is joining us today and we’re going to have a conversation about the WordPress community. The things that we do well, and perhaps the things that we could improve. And we’re going to probably use Drupal as a comparison.

Before we get into that, Chris, I know it’s a dreadfully banal question, but it’s always good to scope out where you are and where you stand with WordPress and Drupal and the companies that you work for. So just a moment really to give us your little potted bio of who you are and what have you.

[00:04:04] Chris Reynolds: Sure. My name is Chris Reynolds, I am a developer advocate at Pantheon. I was formerly a senior software engineer for Pantheon for about three years, before joining the developer relations team around August, right before WordCamp US in September last year.

I’ve been in the WordPress community for close to 20 years. I think I’ve gone back to my first blog posts and my first, like talking about technology that I was using. And I think that I’ve found references to using WordPress in some capacity back in 2005, so almost exactly 20 years.

But even before that I was really interested, like as a side hobby in just open source software, playing with Linux and playing with other open source community projects that I found I was really a big fan of one called Ampache for a long time, which was a music sort of library app thing written in PHP. That was really cool. I think it still exists even.

But yeah, so I’m a developer advocate at Pantheon. That means I do a lot of these sorts of things, talk about best practices, write a lot of blog posts, get in a lot of trouble, not really, and go to events and stuff like that. So I was at DrupalCon in March. I was at PressConf last month. Probably doing stuff this summer and in the fall.

[00:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: Just to lean in a little bit on the Pantheon side of things. Pantheon, a hosting company, but very much aligned in two worlds, maybe more than two. But from my perspective, I used to use Drupal exclusively until about 2015. That was my CMS of choice for many, many years. I think Drupal 4, and then finally I jumped ship at Drupal 8 over to WordPress and have been that consistently.

But Pantheon was around as what felt like at that time, so we are going back more than a decade, the only sort of managed Drupal host, but it definitely had a WordPress side to it as well. Can you just speak to that for us for a moment? That is Pantheon’s sort of MVP, isn’t it? It handles managed hosting for both of those platforms. And maybe there’s more, I don’t know.

[00:05:57] Chris Reynolds: Yeah. I mean, I think that from a platform perspective, we obviously do host Drupal and WordPress. We also can host like Next.js and sort of front end sites. But the sort of hidden Pantheon magic is in the kind of DevOps, WebOps we like to call it, layer that happens like somewhere between pushing code and the code being a thing that like site managers and editors and things like work with, right? So automation tools, and we were one of the first providers that used Git by default. Now that’s not such a big deal anymore, but like that was a big thing within Pantheon for a really long time.

When I was a developer, the first time that I used Pantheon as a developer when I was back at WebDevStudios was, the thing that was the killer feature for me was we have a thing called Multi Dev, which is, each site has a development, a test, and a live environment. So everybody gets those three things and we have a very specific sort of workflow. Code goes to dev, to test, to live in that order. But we have these Multi Devs, which are entirely separate containers where you can build, you can do all your feature development on a branch in a Multi Dev and see what that looks like before merging it into dev.

It sounds like maybe not that much now, but I know when I was back in agency life and even when I was working at Human Made and we had built our own sort of stack that had this very similar kind of system, we didn’t have Multi Dev because spinning up new containers for sites that you’re just going to destroy at some point in the next couple weeks or days anyway is expensive and hard.

And so what that meant was the master branch, or the development branch, of all of your code is always really messy and dirty, and you want to keep that away from the code that is going to production, right? Because that’s where your experimental code is. Maybe you didn’t back it out entirely. That’s where like a whole bunch of weird database stuff is going. That’s like the junk, right? So you want to keep that separate from like your staging branch and your production branch.

And with Pantheon, the idea is your development branch is just where your finalised code goes, because you can do all that testing in a separate environment and then when you go from dev to test, it’s not a headache, it’s just this is production ready code, basically.

[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember my recollection of Pantheon was that it was one of those platforms that, well, platform really, it felt more like a platform than a host, if you know what I mean? It just offered more as a layer on top of the typical host that you might find.

However, you also do a whole bunch of stuff around the Drupal space, but also the WordPress space. I’m just curious, maybe you don’t have this information, but maybe as a developer advocate, you do. What would you say, as a percentage, does Drupal represent as opposed to WordPress? You know, is it like an 80, 20 split, a 90, 10, a 50, 50?

[00:08:40] Chris Reynolds: We’re almost exactly 50, 50.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[00:08:43] Chris Reynolds: And we’ve actually honestly been 50, 50 for about five-ish years, five or six years.

[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: So does that mean that in the Drupal side of things, okay, dear listener, WordPress as a CMS is a giant, it’s a leviathan of a thing, you know. Occupies a massive amount of the market share. Drupal I think is somewhere in the region of, I think it’s like 1.2% or something like that.

[00:09:05] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, we might be creeping up to two-ish, but yeah, it’s pretty low, yeah.

[00:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: That then implies that you as a company have, you’ve got your foot on the pedal more on the Drupal side of things. Maybe the people who are building clever things on top of Drupal are using you much more. You’re a bigger player in that space than you are inside the WordPress space, even though it’s, you know, the same in terms of revenue. As a community endeavor, Drupal probably means a lot more to you than WordPress maybe.

[00:09:32] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, I mean definitely going to DrupalCon for my first time this last March, it’s definitely, so there’s Acquia, which is essentially Drupal’s version of Automattic. Acquia is a company that was founded by Dries, who is the founder of Drupal, and very much like managed Drupal hosting the same kind of thing that Automattic is into, and a lot of the sort of same ideas, at least from a, where it sits in the ecosystem.

But, you know, you go to a WordCamp and you see the big Automattic booth and you’ll see a couple other sort of bigger hosting booths. At a DrupalCon it’s like, there’s the Pantheon booth and there’s the Acquia booth, and then there’s a bunch of little things. We’re definitely the kind of headliners because between the two of us, I think probably we do own most of those Drupal sites that exist in the ecosystem. But we’re definitely a bigger fish in that pond, than perhaps the WordPress pond. There’s also a lot more fish in the WordPress pond.

It’s an interesting thing, like for me coming to DrupalCon for the first time, to see just what Pantheon’s footprint is in contrast to when I go to WordCamps. And, you know, we were big in WordCamps for a long time, and then we kind of pulled back a little bit, and then the intervening time it’s I think felt by the community like, well, who are you? Where did you go? We’ve gotten sort of feedback from folks being like, I used to think about Pantheon, but like it’s been a long time, you laid a lot of people off. Why should I care anymore?

And that’s, you know, part of my personal goal is to say, no, this is why you should care. That’s one of the things that excited me of joining the DevRel team was to go back to our roots and go back into the community, and we still have a really good product that I believed in when I was a developer and I still think is really good as, you know, obviously I think of it as a developer advocate. But like I’m here because I like the thing. I think we have a good thing.

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you basically have the exact same platform for both of the CMSs? So I know there’s all the other stuff that you do, but let’s just concentrate on Drupal and concentrate on WordPress, those two things. Do you basically have the exact same platform? Or is there some nuance that you can do this on WordPress because of, I don’t know, WP-CLI or the REST API or whatever it is that you can’t do in the Drupal side? In other words, if I sign up for a Drupal account, do things look different, behave differently, or is it broadly the same?

[00:11:45] Chris Reynolds: It is broadly the same. There is sort of individual differences but they’re very minor. And honestly like, in many ways, I think that when Pantheon, and this is before my time, obviously, but I think when Pantheon jumped into the WordPress boat, it was really more of a, well, we have this stack and we’re really good at this thing, and WordPress is also a PHP application that has a lot of the same requirements, surely we can just run the exact same stack for WordPress.

And what’s sort of evolved over time is like, well, that’s like 80% true, but it’s the 20% that’s really important. And if you just go into building WordPress sites or hosting WordPress sites with the same mentality as you’re doing Drupal, well, you are going to run into a lot of the growing pains that we ran into, right? Drupal from like a database perspective is far more efficient. The queries are much shorter because the way that it’s structured is more efficient than WordPress. WordPress, you kind of have to do more sort of optimisation on top. So those are things that we needed to figure out.

The Drupal space sort of moved toward Solr as their sort of search tool of choice, which is a project from the Apache project. WordPress went into Elasticsearch. So trying to convince a WordPress team to use Solr, in fact, a pretty old version of Solr, is kind of pulling teeth. Like, well, why would I do that when I’m doing Elasticsearch for everything else? I don’t know why you would do that, honestly. Like, you should probably use Elasticsearch.

And so we’re like actually going in, that’s a project that’s on the roadmap as well finally, it’s something I’ve been talking about for like three years internally. There’s little nuances. Drupal obviously since version eight has been using Composer as a fundamental part of how the CMS just works. Whereas WordPress, you’ve got some people that are using Composer, in fact, last time I was here, two years ago, I was talking about Composer. And I don’t know that the adoption of Composer has really changed much in the WordPress ecosystem since that time.

I would like to say that it has. I still think that you should be using Composer. Throwback to the last WP Tavern Jukebox podcast that I was on about Composer. But yeah, so there’s little differences and I think that that’s, there’s not anything from a platform level where your experience is going to be that much different.

[00:14:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you were to take a look at the Pantheon platform, I think quickly poking around on the site, maybe the pricing page or something would give you an intuition that really you are kind of more for the sort of enterprise level, I think would be fair to say. You know, you are trying to get the bleeding edge out of the websites that you’ve got, and so it’s, high traffic, that kind of thing.

But the endeavor today really is to put all of that code stuff to one side and get into the community side of things. So just to reiterate, we threw around a couple of words there, and maybe the listener doesn’t really know that even there’s a WordPress community or a Drupal community.

There really is. There’s just hundreds, maybe thousands of people who attend events, they might go to a local thing, which we might call them Meetup on the WordPress side of things. I don’t know if there’s similar things in Drupal. But then there’s these bigger events, which we’d call WordCamps, and then there are bigger ones of those which are kind of flagship WordCamps.

There’s one in the US, there’s one in Asia, and there’s one in Europe. They happen each year. And thousands of people show up and inhabit the same space, listen to presentations, hang out in the hallway.

And then you’ve got the same thing happening on the Drupal side. It’s called Drupal Con, but forgive my ignorance, I think the DrupalCon thing is a once a year thing and it moves around the globe. It’s not necessarily in the same space. Have I got that about right?

[00:15:15] Chris Reynolds: It’s more than once a year. It’s actually the equivalent. So DrupalCon is the equivalent of flagship WordCamps. So there’s a DrupalCon, there was a DrupalCon US in Atlanta this last year. There is going to be a DrupalCon Europe in, where is it? Maybe Vienna, in the fall. There’s a DrupalCon Asia that’s just starting to get fired up. That’s happening I think in, the next one is like 2026, I believe. I think they just had their first one. So very similar, like the Cons in the Drupal space are equivalent to the flagship WordCamps. There’s also DrupalCamps in much the same way as there are local WordCamps.

I feel like in the WordPress space, a lot of the local WordCamps kind of, they either blew up and got super big, or they kind of fizzled after Covid, right? I don’t have a lot of local camps. I don’t see a lot of local camps anymore. I do see those things happening a little bit in the Drupal space, or at least starting up again.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah so, what we’re basically painting a picture of here is that we’ve got two bits of software which basically are trying to achieve the same thing. They’re a CMS. They’re trying to make it so that non-technical, as well as technical people, can run a project and put it online. Whether that’s a website or an e-commerce solution, whatever it may be, you’re trying to get your stuff out onto the internet. And both of those things will work.

But also, behind the code is a bunch of people who are willing to go and hang out in the same place, the community, if you like, attend these events. And so there’s massive similarity. In fact, you know, if you’re an alien landing, I suspect that you wouldn’t really know that the two things were different. Okay, there’s different advertisers in the hall and there’s different logos and things, but broadly they would probably look really similar.

However, in the more recent past, and if you don’t know the story, I’m not going to go into it too much here, but you can figure it out by looking at various news articles in the WordPress space and what have you. The WordPress community has really been pulled in different directions, let’s say that. And it’s curious because no sooner had this happened than some of the more prominent people, Dries Buytaert, who is the founder of Drupal, put out a piece, really as a way of kind of offering, look, this is what Drupal do. We know you’ve got on the WordPress side things that are not working out for you. Here’s our model.

And far be it from me to say whether that is the perfect system. I don’t really know it, but I was just curious to get your thoughts on what that is. And that’s going to really occupy the majority of the rest of this podcast. What the Drupal community looks like. What you believe it does well. How it does things differently. So let’s start there. Let’s start with Dries’, what he was telling us about. How does Drupal, the community, how does it do things differently in terms of, I don’t know, events, the access to the code? So yeah, a conversation around that really. So I’m just going to throw it over to you, Chris. How is Drupal different than WordPress on that level?

[00:18:05] Chris Reynolds: Well, I was saying before we got on that I kind of had a crash course in Drupal when I went leading up to, and then immediately following going to DrupalCon. Part of that crash course was at DrupalCon, they actually have a community summit. It’s similar to like, in WordPress we’ve had sort of community summits before. At DrupalCon it was really more of like a track, with like presenters and like also conversations. It’s like space for chatting and hanging out with people.

But mostly, mostly it was like community related talks in a space, talking about what’s working, what’s not working, as well as a sort of a get to know you sort of thing. And that was really helpful. I also did homework before the event in watching a couple of Dries’ last Dries Notes. So Matt has State of the Word, Dries has Dries Notes, which is just like keynote. It’s basically the same thing, like the same state of the CMS, right?

I caught up on what was going on in Drupal before the Con. And one of the things that I learned about, and then I followed up and dug into the history a little bit, was we have the same problems, right? WordPress and Drupal have the same fundamental sort of issues from both a contribution standpoint as well as a just organisational, managerial management kind of standpoint.

And Drupal, or Dries, just kind of got to a point sooner where he’s like, well, I can’t do all of these things. So the Drupal Association, and I’m sure there’s some Drupalistas that are going to correct me on my history, but as I understand it, the Drupal Association was initially formed to sort of manage events, because Dries knew that they needed to have events. They were having events, they started off just similar to WordPress, small camp things. And they started getting bigger and Dries is like, well, I can’t do all of the management stuff of this, so I need to like do something, create an organisation that can do that stuff.

And that was where the Drupal Association first was founded, to sort of manage that thing. And then over time, that evolved into being able to fund, or kind of oversee, directions for where, more of like a community representative in the general sort of CMS development ecosystem, right?

There is a board. They are elected by the community. They are paid. They manage events, but they also, all of the money that is made after expenses and stuff from DrupalCons and donations and whatever, they have the authority to direct into whatever projects they think would be most valuable for the evolution, or the fulfillment, of the ideals of the Drupal software, right?

So Dries says, I want to do a thing, and he can go do that thing. The Drupal Association is like, well, I think that what we really need is this kind of thing, and we’re going to devote some of our resources that we have into hiring some folks to work on that thing.

So, most recently, where you can kind of see this in action is there’s been a lot of hype about Drupal CMS. That is a thing that exists because of the Drupal Association, because the Drupal Association saw, okay, I mean, I assume, I’m reading between the lines. But I assume that you can’t ignore the sort of declining line of Drupal in the broader ecosystem of CMS usage. But also, there’s been a really big problem since Drupal seven of a lot of the sites on Drupal seven remain on Drupal seven.

Drupal seven should be end of life by all accounts. Everything else up to the current version is end of life. Drupal seven isn’t, because there’s still, it’s now just under, but it’s still close to 50% of Drupal sites are running Drupal seven. It’s a version of Drupal that’s about 10 years old.

And the reason why, there’s so many people. Drupal historically has always been a thing where, when a new version came along, you kind of killed your old site and rebuilt it in the new version, because it wasn’t sort of backwards compatible. WordPress has gotten around that by just remaining backwards compatible all throughout its history.

Drupal seven to Drupal eight was the first version to introduce Composer. We talked about Composer and how a Composer’s been part of Drupal for a really long time. that was the cutoff. So that was a pretty big shift. And there’s a lot of people, teams, organizations that have not made, or have been reluctant to make that shift because it’s a, it’s a rebuild. It’s a full site rebuild.

It’s not just, we can just migrate the thing over. You have to rebuild your site. You do need to migrate your stuff over, but also you need to rebuild your site. So in the intervening time, WordPress has gained adoption and acceptance and grown into 43%. And so now we’ve got these Drupal seven sites where it’s like, well, we need to rebuild anyway. Do we rebuild the site in Drupal 10, 11? Or do we rebuild the site in WordPress where I’m never going to have this problem ever again.

And that’s where a lot of that like, bar graph, a lot of those sites have moved to WordPress. Some of them have stayed on Drupal, but it’s a declining number, right?

So obviously, folks inside Drupal see this and know that it’s happening, and know that they need to do something about it. So Drupal CMS is basically like a layer on top of the latest version of Drupal, which is 11. It’s got a far nicer installation screen. I wrote a blog post about this on the Pantheon blog, I think. It’s got a far nicer installation screen, that actually walks you through, stepping through like what type of site, what type of content you want to have on your site. To actually get you thinking about the site that you’re building before you just hit install. Which I find to be amazingly refreshing.

And then beyond that the admin interface is far less cluttered. I know one of my personal gripes about working with Drupal, even up until, up until now, like up until before Drupal CMS is that there’s too many buttons, there’s too many menus, there’s too much stuff. Like, I don’t know where stuff is.

This feels a lot more familiar, partially because I think it kind of resembles the WordPress admin a little bit. You know, sidebar on the left, menus. And it feels just more, more familiar to me. And then also they have built in some new architectural things like, recipes are a thing where, a recipe, Drupal has modules, WordPress has plugins. Modules generally need a lot of configuration, to get them actually working.

When you install a module, it’s not like it just works outta the box. A lot of WordPress plugins, you install a plugin, it just works outta the box. So a recipe is like, here is, maybe a collection of modules, maybe a specific module, but it’s probably a combination of a bunch of different modules, but also the configuration that goes along with them.

So when you install a recipe, it’s like, here’s the stuff that you probably will need. You’re most likely to need this stuff in this order, configured with these settings, and then you can do whatever you need after that. But like, here’s the go bag and now you can move on. So, one of the really interesting recipes for Drupal CMS is the SEO recipe.

And that is interesting because they’re using a Yoast module. The Yoast module is literally taking the JavaScript of Yoast SEO from the WordPress plugin and throwing it into Drupal. And what’s fascinating about that is it doesn’t have all of the other stuff that comes with the Yoast plugin, it’s just the traffic light system, and the scanning the text system and it’s, so it’s the best possible implementation of Yoast that I’ve seen because it’s all of the good stuff.

They’ve also built an AI recipe. And that’s interesting because when that is configured, you can actually talk to an AI chat bot inside your Drupal instance and ask it questions about Drupal or about your site. You could say, hey, I need to create an event content type. I’m gonna be hosting events. They’re this type of thing. I need to have a, like a, date picker and whatever, and we are taking attendees and you can tell that the chat bot that that’s the thing that you need. And it will, to the best of its ability, build that content type inside Drupal for you.

So the WordPress equivalent is, I have a podcast and I need an episode post type. I just talk to a chat bot, and it magically creates that episode post type for me with like the Gutenberg blocks I need. That makes it an audio format or whatever. And, it’s just there for you. It’s like, great, thank you chat bot. As a WordPress developer, I think that’s really cool. Because that’s kind of the thing that I want, is like I know how to do some things, but I really don’t know any of the buttons and gears and gizmos in the Drupal admin.

But if I have a chat bot to sort of help guide me through, I know I can figure out the rest of the way, or I can see how it did the thing, and I can figure out, oh okay, so that’s what I need to do. And so all of these things are geared toward the idea of just getting more people using Drupal and lowering the barrier to entry.

Because one of the big things with Drupal is it’s always been really developer centric, really highly technical, and you need sort of skilled individuals to even just manage the site. So if we lower that barrier to entry, you can target the people that are already using WordPress, the sort of content level people or the site administrators that don’t have a lot of technical experience.

That’s all like basically because the Drupal Association put money, funding that they had into backing these very specific projects.

[00:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of a curious idea, isn’t it? It’s like a subset of the CMSs capabilities put into this one project, Drupal CMS. Which has like a target audience in mind. So it’s like a blogger, or a podcaster or something like that. You know, it’s for content creators. That was the message I got from when I read all of the, the marketing bits and pieces that came out.

But also addressing the need for it to look nice. That was always an area I thought WordPress excelled at. When you logged into the WordPress admin, it was night and day looking at a Drupal admin. Everything was consistent. Everything looked modern and clean and easy to understand. On the Drupal side, it was, it was much more difficult to understand. But also things like updating plugins. Backwards compatibility on the WordPress side, always much more straightforward. On the Drupal side, much more difficult.

And so this is such a curious experiment. Putting it into the hands of people who might want a blog, or whatever it may be, and hopefully making it more straightforward. And the website for it, I will link to it in the show notes, it’s just so kind of modern and appealing and friendly and, Drupal never, for me at least when I got to Drupal eight, for the exact reasons that you described, that’s all of my sites would have stayed on Drupal seven.

It definitely wasn’t that kind of warm and fuzzy welcome to everybody kind of thing. But now it really look like it’s leaning into that. But getting back to your main point, that was funded from the inside by some, facets, some internal mechanisms, some body inside the Drupal Association that decided that’s what we need to do. This is where the money’s going. But are you saying that decision making was divorced from Dries?

[00:29:02] Chris Reynolds: Dries leads the technical architecture. And Dries will like say we need to do a thing. And he may be personally involved in the leadership of doing that thing, but mostly he’s like at a director level. Like, go my people and go forth and do stuff. And the Drupal Association says, okay, well one of the things that Dries said we need to do is X. So how can we make X happen? And in the case of recipes, it meant getting agencies and people from agencies involved. Create like a coalition. Like there’s a bunch, it wasn’t just one agency. It was like a bunch of people from different agencies are working on this thing together. Which is another thing that I find really interesting about the Drupal ecosystem.

I have thoughts about that too. But in this context, yeah, I get a bunch of different people to work on this thing. Um. Whether it’s the SEO recipe. Whether it’s the AI recipe, and they, I think the way that it sort of broke down is, and it might have been even Dries that conceptualized the idea of recipes and it’s like, okay, go out and implement this thing.

But when they did, it was like, okay, if we’re gonna do this thing, we need these types of recipes from the get go, from day one. We need SEO, we need whatever. We need AI, we need content things, so that people have an idea of what a recipe is and can start building their own recipes.

[00:30:15] Nathan Wrigley: So they’re bound into it? You can’t install Drupal CMS without those things. They’re just there.

[00:30:20] Chris Reynolds: It supports the recipes, and in the installation process, when you’re doing the Drupal CMS installation, that screen that I was talking about, where it’s like asking you the type of site you want to build, those types of sites in quotations, correspond to sets of recipes that align with each of those things.

It doesn’t ask you about AI in the installation screen, but it does sort of say like, oh, do you want this type of content or that type of content? And then we, based on your selection, it automatically installs those recipes for you.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s installing things based upon a wizard at the beginning, but the principle being though that you the end user, not really interacting with anything apart from oh, I would like that. Yes, please. I would like that. And then you finally get to the end of the wizard, wait for a few moments. The modules get installed, activated, and they’re pre-configured to behave in a way which is likely to be the best that you can get.

[00:31:08] Chris Reynolds: To get you as close to what you want as possible. And the goal, the roadmap, is Dries wants to actually take that one step further, and do sort of site templates where if a recipe is a collection of modules and configuration, a template would be like, I want to build a real estate site. So I download this template, or I install this template and then click a button or two and it gives me a real estate site with the configuration that I might need to have a real estate site.

And obviously I can go in and customize things, but I have a starting point. One of the things that I heard a lot when I was talking to people within Drupal, among other things, there’s not really a marketplace as much for stuff, for software, for add-ons in the way that there is in WordPress. And there’s not really in particular, there’s not really the same sort of like theme or a repository, or a place to go for commonly used or shared themes in the way that we have the Themes Repository. Mostly you have like the default things and then you’re building your own.

So, as a user, having a template that maybe comes with a theme that is specifically tuned for that type of site is a really big win, because there really isn’t an alternative in the current ecosystem within Drupal.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s, really worth leaning into because again, please interrupt me if what I’m about to say doesn’t actually match reality anymore. But when I was using Drupal, there was basically no commercial plugin system. Everybody had kind of leaned into the same thing for the same problem.

So if you wanted to put a form on your website, there were a few, but there was this one called Webform, and it was just the one everybody leaned into it. And so rather than in the WordPress space where you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a few repository ones that are free and easy to use, and then you’ve got the commercial ones that you can pay for and they add different features and support levels and all that kind of thing.

In the Drupal space, it felt like there was just this one kind of community endeavor to do the thing. Yeah, so if you wanted something to display data, Views was the thing you used. The Views module, and I think that did actually get rolled into Core. So it’s there. My point being, there isn’t this sort of, shattering is the wrong word, but in the WordPress space, there’s often a dozen, more than a dozen, there’s multiple alternatives. So you have to go and find the right thing.

In the Drupal space, it feels more like, okay, for that problem, we have this module, and everybody leans into it. So I’m presuming that all the people who contribute in the community to the code and what have you, they’ll all finesse that version. But that means therefore, that when you come to build the CMS, there’s basically this one way of doing it? Okay, if you want forms, we’re going to use that module. And if we’re going to add this feature for real estate or what have you, here’s the modules that we’re going to add in. And the jigsaw of those modules will make it work. And that’s different from WordPress. WordPress has much more leaned into commercial plugins and kind of figure out which ones you want for yourself.

[00:34:04] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, that was one of the things that I didn’t know going into DrupalCon that I learned while I was there. It’s a really different approach, and I actually kind of appreciate the Drupal model because the community is built around more of an idea of, if I build a form plugin and you build a form plugin, and mine is the defacto form plugin or.

In the Drupal space, it’s really more of a, well, let me talk to you and see what ideas you have that we can bring into the canonical one and just collectively like integrate those things. And that’s, that is a thing that happens more often than not in Drupal. That’s why you don’t see the competition, the competing modules for different things.

Because if you had a competing thing, or you had a different idea, you would contribute it to the one module that does that thing. Or if you had a different thing, then you might be invited to do the same, right?

In the WordPress space, it’s like I want to protect my form module or my form plugin because right now it’s free, but tomorrow I might want to sell it, and I want to keep my intellectual property to myself and not contribute because, you know, I might wanna make a buck on this later.

And, I kind of like the other thing better because it’s more, it is more of a community. Like I get like wanting to make money and everybody wants to make money and have a form plug in. Like, that’s great. Like I’m not going to say Gravity Forms shouldn’t exist or anything like that. Gravity Forms is amazing. But I do think that building an ecosystem around contributing to a collective, or a community based solution for the thing, where everybody has a, a say or a seat at the table, is a really, I don’t know, possibly overly idealistic, but very optimistic sort of view of how we can contribute to software.

I find it really nice. Like it feels good. Like it feels less like we’re all trying to grab our little piece of territory, you know?

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: It feels to me like that moment when you first install Linux. And you realize, wow, there’s a free OS that I can put on my computer. And there’s just something quite remarkable about that. That a bunch of people got together and, really pointed everything at this one solution. I suppose that is the choice that you’re going to make. Really, that there is something right in there.

You know, the commercial side of WordPress has probably been its single biggest accelerator. The fact that people could build businesses on it. And they could have a living. They could obviously refine and finess and dedicate real time entire lifetimes, in many cases. Get staff on, support staff and what have you. Pay all of those people because they’ve cracked this nut and everybody wants a piece of it.

Whereas on the Drupal side, it’s much more, let’s go for egalitarian, let’s say that. But it, also, I suppose, means that at the moment where something doesn’t work you probably have to either understand how to maintain that yourself or hire a developer.

So there’s a bit of a trade off there. And I presume, like I said, I imagine that’s why there was this acceleration of WordPress’s popularity because the people who maybe were buying these plugins had that intention, I just want a website. I don’t want to learn how to code. I’m not interested in that.

I can see over here, look, I can buy that. It’s $97 a year. That’s perfect. That’ll satisfy me perfectly. Whereas maybe more on the Drupal side, it’s okay, that kind of works, but not entirely. I now need to make it work and obviously the community can do that.

So that leads me then to the next question, which is, who the heck builds Drupal? So in the WordPress space, if you’re listening to this, you probably have an understanding of that. There’s a lot of volunteers, but there’s also a lot of companies that will dedicate a proportion of their time. We have this idea of Five for the Future. And so 5% of whatever it is that you want to give, be that time or money, or what have you. And so there’s this idea of community massively, but also corporations, businesses, putting time in. Is it the same basically on the Drupal side? Is that how it works?

[00:37:51] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, largely. One of the things that I think you’ll notice that is a little bit of a distinction between WordPress and Drupal, from the events again. Is going through like the showroom, the sponsors floor. And at a WordCamp you see the hosts obviously, but then you see a lot of like plugin development shops, and that’s pretty much what I would expect, right? Big plugin or theme development shops and WordPress hosts. And a lot of the WordPress hosts are doing plugin development, and like, that’s sort of the thing.

In Drupal, and at DrupalCon, obviously we have the hosts. And we had a, I mean, CKE Editor was there. That was kind of weird to me. I don’t know, like it’s in Drupal. It was weird to have like a library have a booth space. That seemed weird to me. But like it’s a lot of agencies, because agencies are the ones that are doing the work, and I’ve never seen an agency or maybe not since very small, like local WordCamps, have I seen an agency with a sponsorship, a booth space at a WordCamp.

But that is, that’s where it is. And it’s agencies that do a lot of that Core contribution, because they’re also in the weeds working with clients and building these things for their Drupal customers. And so like, the SEO recipe that I was talking about, like at DrupalCon we, Pantheon has booth demos. Acquia also has booth demos, which means we can talk about, like do demos of our platform, whatever. What we actually did was bring in guest speakers from like agencies and universities and whatever that are actually using Drupal and Pantheon and to talk about their implementation of the cool stuff that they’re doing, because that works better.

And one of the people that I talked to was about the SEO recipe, and he is at an agency and he worked with other people at other agencies, competing agencies even, to make this SEO recipe. So it’s, that’s where the contribution comes from. But again, like it’s the same sort of thing.

Dries said 10 years ago, wrote a blog post about the maker taker problem, as he defines it. And then again in September, in relation to the current state of things in the WordPress ecosystem, because that’s a thing that he’s been thinking about for a long time. It’s obviously a thing that Matt’s been thinking about for a long time.

Like it’s not, again, we’re not that different. We have the same fundamental problems. At the Community Summit at DrupalCon, one of the topics of conversation was getting more people involved, a younger generation involved into Drupal development, which is the exact same conversation we’re having in WordPress as well.

Like, how do we appeal to a younger audience? It’s all the same stuff, right? And there was at some point like a contribution like pie chart. Again, similar to the pie chart that could be displayed at a WordCamp. You know, Automattic does a big chunk of that pie chart.

And then you’ve got, you know, maybe Google does a smaller part of that pie chart and maybe like Bluehost or whatever. Similar pie chart. Acquia does a lot of the big part of the, of that pie chart. And then like other agencies are noted around, and then there’s like an other category, right, of just like individual contributors. It’s a very similar breakdown.

[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting because obviously you alluded to the fact that WordPress has been in a state of flux since September. But Dries, I presume prompted by the situation that arose out of WordCamp US. He wrote a piece very much timed after that. So I presume it was in, there was some sort of correlation in his head. And he was laying out how Drupal have, not solved, but how they just have a different approach to that. And I can’t remember every single detail, but there was some curious examples in the Drupal community, like this kind of, I’m going to say pay to play thing.

In other words, if you as a company, let’s say Pantheon may fit into this perfectly, if Pantheon steps through certain hoops and can prove that they did this thing and this thing and this thing for the community, for the Drupal project. If you step through those hoops, you then get, kind of, merit on the other side.

You can, for example, turn up to DrupalCon as a sponsor. My understanding is that maybe it’s only certain tiers, I’m not really sure. But you can’t sponsor DrupalCon unless you have jumped through those hoops. And we don’t really have anything on the WordPress side like that. We have Five for the Future, but it’s hard to pin down. It’s hard to figure out who did what and what have you, because there aren’t the same sort of goalposts, but it feels like the goalposts are a bit more nailed down on the Drupal side.

[00:42:03] Chris Reynolds: There is a process of nailing things down. I don’t know that it goes to the level of, like you can’t actually sponsor, because obviously Pantheon does sponsor and we’ve been, on the other end of being told that we don’t contribute enough to both WordPress and Drupal. But that also depends on how you define contribution really. And I have thoughts about that. The merit thing, it’s just where you’re drawing the lines in the sand. And Drupal has, Dries has his particular lines and the things that make you a contributor to the ecosystem, and what that means in Drupal.

And then, to a degree, I mean, yeah, like you said, Five for the Future is kind of, sort of that thing, but it’s also kind of amalgamous and like it’s honor based. There’s not really a real sense of tracking or, you could kind of, sort of track things, I guess. But it’s very wibbly wobbly.

But my perspective on contribution always has always been, one of the things, I know we’re not supposed to talk about what was talked about at PressConf, but Brad Williams, who I, was my former boss said, he was talking about Five for the Future and was talking about how Web Dev was very early on an adopter of Five for the Future, and I was there at the time, so I remember this. So it’s not just Brad’s words that I’m repeating. And the way that he approached Five for the Future was very much in the umbrella of if you’re doing anything WordPress related that is open source, we are counting that as a Five for the Future project, right. And that was how I understood Five for the Future.

That was kind of how it was presented back in 2014 or whatever when Matt first threw the idea out to the, out to the ecosystem. And since then it’s sort of become this thing where contribution to WordPress really means Core contributions, or contributions in very specific ways. And it doesn’t mean all of this other stuff over here, including an up to theme development, plugin development.

Even if that stuff is on .org, even if that stuff is open source, that’s not included in contribution. But I’m very much in the side of the bucket where like, well, everything is kind of contribution. We wouldn’t know how good WordPress scales to like enterprise level sites that are running it today, that are driving the adoption of WordPress, and driving the bar in like the visibility of WordPress, if it wasn’t for just hosts that are running the thing and making sure that it operates properly. And the teams like 10up and Human Made, and whoever who are like then, oh, to get this working at its best, fastest, most optimized state we need to do some enhancements. Either through the plugin ecosystem or contributing back to Core, so that we can push this code to these hosts, or platforms, or softwares as a service or whatever so that they operate for these clients that we’re building.

So like I kind of feel like everything should be, even if you are a taker, in the language of Dries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not pushing the ecosystem forward. And I have that critique for both of our BDFLs, right? Because they both have very similar ideas.

Like I think that the contribution title could be applied and should be applied more broadly, because everything that we’re doing is driving the project forward. A lot of the stuff that I write is like GitHub actions, or like plugins or things that are still broadly available to, and publicly available, and they’re open source and they’re for the community, but they’re not technically contribution, because contribution is narrowed down into this very specific definition.

[00:45:30] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious, you know, if you were to cast your mind back 20 years, the beginning of both Drupal and WordPress, just even the idea that they would still be around for one thing, you know, that that software wouldn’t have just come and eaten them up and there would be like a two year lifespan.

[00:45:44] Chris Reynolds: And that there’s an open source solution for these things.

[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s going and it’s kept rising and it’s kept being used. That’s just so curious. But also the teething pains of that. The idea that, you know, it started with Matt, and it started with Dries, and then people got on board and it grew. And then in the case of Drupal, and in the case of WordPress, it just grew to the point where these individuals can no longer handle everything.

You know, you described how Dries needed to sort of say, can somebody handle the events please? Because that’s just not where I want to be. The same, presumably on the WordPress side. And now we’re into giant communities. Really, really complicated communities. A lot of differing opinions, a lot of different maybe even politics, but a lot of different backgrounds, geography, the whole thing.

It’s this international thing. And it’s difficult. It’s really, really hard to get it right. But what I’m taking from this conversation. Is that maybe Drupal do things differently, but they have way more in common than we have as differences.

But also maybe there are some things that WordPress does better. Maybe there are some things that Drupal does better. And it would be very, very interesting if the two communities could kind of collide more, and share those ideas and we pick the best of each of them. It’s never gonna be perfect, but maybe that’s something that in the future, given that really at a very core level we’re not in competition with each other, it would be very nice if those conversations could take place.

And I think you’ve laid the groundwork for a lot of that and explained how one project is not that dissimilar to the other one. So, that’s it.

Chris, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it. That was very enlightening.

[00:47:22] Chris Reynolds: Thank you for having me. I always love chatting with you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a personal journey through the history of the internet from start to now.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wp tavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Wes Tatters. Wes has been immersed in the tech space for close to four decades, starting his journey with early computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS 80. He’s been an author, with multiple books on internet technologies to his name, has worked across AV and media, and today he’s the driving force behind Rapyd Cloud, a globally distributed hosting company. Wes’ perspective is shaped as much by his hands-on experience building communities on CompuServe, AOL and MSN, as by his deep involvement with modern open source platforms like WordPress.

Wes starts off by sharing some of the fascinating stories from the early web, when getting online meant stringing together modems and bulletin boards, and long distance communication felt nothing short of miraculous. He talks about the evolution of the internet as a space for community, and how chance encounters in early online forums led to opportunities like writing for Netscape and shaping the very first JavaScript Developer Guides.

We then discuss the changing meaning of community across different eras of the internet, touching on the shift from closed walled gardens, like AOL, to the open source ethos that powers projects like WordPress, and much else that we take for granted online. Wes describes how WordPress’ flexibility and openness allowed anyone, anywhere, to claim their own piece of the web without technical barriers, and how this has contributed to its rise as a cornerstone of global digital freedom and self-expression.

Our conversation also examines the challenges, and potential missteps, of the modern internet from social loneliness, to the commercial world of social media. And reflects on WordPress’s role in helping steer a path back to more positive, open, and empowering online experiences.

If you’re interested in how the history of the internet directly shaped WordPress, the Open Web, and the communities we build today, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Wes Tatters.

I am joined on the podcast today by Wes Tatters. Hello, Wes.

[00:03:50] Wes Tatters: Nathan, good to be talking together again.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got to be very, very, accommodating of Wes’ time, because for me it’s about four in the afternoon, something like that. Wes, on the other side of the planet, is giving up his time at about one in the morning. I have no idea why you are here, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:04:07] Wes Tatters: Oh look, my day tends to be largely focused on talking to people in Europe, and in the United States. Half my employees are in those parts of the world as well. So I tend to work midnight to midnight. And we’re in the middle of a big product launch, for Rapyd, which has meant we’re just talking, and being visible, and I’m awake and happy to chat.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: So you literally pivot your day, your Australian day, you pivot it so that you are available for North American and European customers. So we should probably say you work for a hosting company called Rapyd Cloud, And that’s where the thrust of your marketing endeavors go. So you pivot your day?

[00:04:41] Wes Tatters: Yeah, like about, I think about 60% of our customers are in the United States, and about 30, 45, 35 are in Europe, and 5% or something in Asia, Which is pretty generic for the WordPress space. Our focus is around obviously those markets, but also because we’re a global company, we don’t have a head office.

Everyone who works in our team is doing it remotely. It might be Dubai, or Chicago or the Philippines or Pakistan, India. So we choose times of the day, we have this great calendar and for every meeting we post up a list of all the times, and then there’s happy faces, red faces and smiley faces. And someone will go, all right, I’ll take the red face. That’s the nature of WordPress though.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, madness though, when you think about it. If you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here, I am talking you through a web browser, as if it’s nothing, and it is utterly remarkable. And actually that’s going to be the thrust of this conversation, I think. We’re going to trace the WordPress community in particular, not just the community, the software and what have you, over the period of time it’s been in existence, 21 years odd.

So, do you want just give us your backstory, specifically I guess around WordPress, but just generally in tech? Because I know you’ve done quite a lot of other AV related things as well.

[00:05:54] Wes Tatters: I’ve, been in the tech space for close to 40 years. I was trying to work it out a little while ago, and it’s like, I remember my first computer. It was a Commodore 64 or something, or a TRS 80, or something like that. And I would’ve been 16 or 17, and even then it was like, I was programming them, not playing games on them. I enjoyed programming and coding.

So I started very early in the tech space, but as a result of which, even modems didn’t really exist when I first started in the IT space. Laptops and PCs and computers and certainly iPhones and all that wonderful technology we have today didn’t exist.

But there was already people in the space at places like DARPA, that were going, how do we connect the world? It was a government military strategy. How do we connect the world in the event of a nuclear war? That was the driving mentality behind what they were planning. It was originally going to be a network of radio towers sending, a bit like we had with the old modems, the buzzing noises.

But it was this whole concept of, how do we build a disconnected system that can survive massive breakdowns in the structure of communication? And a part of what they build, ironically, is what makes the internet so powerful these days. It’s that ability to interconnect disparate technologies, disparate systems, all different types of capabilities and devices and all those sorts of things, in ways that are transparent.

As you just said, we’re in two parts of the world and we are talking together in real time. I grew up in the, as a part of my life, in the media world, and film and television and primarily television. In a point in time where if we wanted to conduct a live interview with someone on the other side of the world, firstly, we had to book satellite space in the thousands of dollars per minute almost. And then we would go, Nathan, are you there?

And Nathan would come back four seconds later, and we would conduct these really bizarre interviews, with delays on this crazy technology. So much so that when live television was first starting, obviously there was a big fear that someone would say naughty words, or swear on television for the want of a better word. And one of the early ways that they originally managed, we have what’s called, a lot of television stations had this big red button called a dump button.

The whole idea was someone said f, someone had to slam the big dump button. But the way they we’re actually handling it was they were actually sending the entire signal up to a satellite and back down to the ground station before they transmitted it. Because that gave them roughly two or three seconds of delay, which gave them the ability for that big red button to stop the transmission point. But the signal had gone up and down through a satellite just to even achieve that craziness.

I came into that world, and started in that world. I was incredibly lucky that I lucked into an IT firm, here in Australia, that was at that stage of company that doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s a company called Wang Microsystems. Dr. Wang was the guy that invented the first memory ship, so he, he’s reasonably well healed, but that entire platform doesn’t exist. But Wang was one of the first it companies to release a processor with a box. There was this three racks that was a modem.

300 characters per second. It was bleedingly fast. But for, its time, and I was one of the first people that got to play with one of those things in Australia. And I’ll tell you what, I was hooked. I just went, even then I could go, oh my goodness. There were dreams of we can make it faster.

And we got 1200 baud, and then we got 1600 baud, and then we got 3,200 baud and 56 k. And every bit was exciting. Because what it was allowing me as a person to do, especially a person in Australia, was to reach out and communicate with people that weren’t in my part of the world. And we had things like America Online, well CompuServe first, I guess prior to America Online.

We had bulletin boards and local BBS software and things like that. And all of them were creating communities. All of them were starting to build communities around this same space. It was something that I really engaged with.

When I got into CompuServe though, it for me changed a lot of things. Because until that stage it was hard to communicate with anyone outside Australia. But with CompuServe, all of a sudden, I was connected to people around the world.

[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: What did that connection actually feel like though? Was it literally, you’d type something, and was it you’d leave the computer, like the email sort of exchange?

[00:10:46] Wes Tatters: They were really very, very similar to an early sort of discussion board. People would leave comments, and people would make comments back and respond, and people built relationships and discussions were built. And in my early life I was an author. I’ve written a number of books on internet technologies.

This is the guy in Brisbane, Australia, who happened to luck into a forum on CompuServe with a guy named Mark Tabor, who was the head of publishing acquisitions for Schuster and Schuster, which is McMillan, and sams.net, the biggest publisher on the planet.

And Mark was going, we are looking for authors to write in this space. They were releasing a new imprint at the time called sams.net, which was going to be like. Theirs was Teach Yourself series.

They were building it at McMillan, and their biggest problem was respectfully that IT people don’t make good writers. Love us, or like us, we don’t even like writing comments in code, let alone knocking out 4 or 500 pages of a book, to tell someone how to do something.

But that ability to be in a community outside of my own space, this is me in Brisbane, Australia, talking to the head of acquisitions for Macmillan, going, yeah, I can write a book. I’d already been doing some writing. I had, as I said from, because I have a media background, I’d been writing for magazine articles in Australia, and I’d been involved in communications and had some journalism experience, so I was kind of already in the space.

And yeah, the book got written. We actually wrote a book that told people how to connect CompuServe to the internet, because previously CompuServe couldn’t be connected to the internet.

[00:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember those times like halcyon day’s, rose tinted spectacles. Because that was real pioneering stuff. The idea that, okay, so dear listener, if you are under the age of 30, your world was entirely connected from the moment you could conceive a thought. In some respect you could turn the tele on and be live tele from around the globe. You may not have had internet access.

[00:12:44] Wes Tatters: I remember trying to explain to my parents what I was doing, and they were looking at me going, you’re doing what? And it wasn’t until the first book, 500 pages, 50 copies arrived in a box from McMillan, that the lights went on in parents’ head who went, okay.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: There’s something in this.

[00:13:05] Wes Tatters: This is odd. And we sold hundreds of thousands of copies of edition of these books. I wrote the same book for America Online.

The joke was America Online actually wasn’t even in Australia at that stage, which was interesting. But it gave me lots of opportunities, and this was about communities. This was about getting into communities. While I was in that community, talking, working with the a AOL team on how they were going to connect to this thing called the internet. There was a little crowd called Netscape banging around, going hey, love what you did, Tim. Love that original browser. We’re going to build a better one.

[00:13:37] Nathan Wrigley: An open one.

[00:13:38] Wes Tatters: An open one. And the Netscape guys had seen my books, came to my publisher and said, hey, could we do a book with Wes on how to write, how to build websites for Netscape? So we wrote six books for Netscape over the next five years, going teach yourself HTML development for Netscape. So community was the whole basis of it.

[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that for people that are born in the last, like I said, 20 years or so, the internet has just been a feature of their life, almost like a utility. Almost in certain parts of the world, like a human right. You might even describe it on that level.

This conduit of information that can come in. This capacity to talk to people, any point on the globe almost immediately with almost zero cost. And in the time that you are describing just the merest foundations of that were beginning. Little glimmers of that would beginning to emerge.

[00:14:34] Wes Tatters: Really edge.

[00:14:35] Nathan Wrigley: Really interesting though. I can imagine your passion and interest and all of that must have been. The curiosity that was spiked by that.

[00:14:42] Wes Tatters: It was. I loved it. But even then, we still didn’t truly understand where it was going.

I remember a call from the team at Netscape going, it was around, I think it was around version three of the Netscape. Going we’ve got this idea we’re going to, we’re going to put a scripting thing in Netscape. What do you think? And I’m going, yeah. What do you mean? What do you think? We need you to include it in the next book. It’s this little thing called JavaScript.

[00:15:04] Nathan Wrigley: Just little thing.

[00:15:06] Wes Tatters: And I remember sitting there going, interesting idea. Can you tell me more about what it can do? And they went, we don’t really know yet. We’re still working on those bits. So we ended up writing the first JavaScript development guide, me and my technical writer, who was my technical editor for my Netscape books. And I wrote the first JavaScript Developers Guide for Netscape.

So we were there in the middle of it, but all the way through, we still didn’t truly get it. It was still such this small thing. I was talking with Bud.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Bud Kraus.

[00:15:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, I was talking with Bud at PressConf, and we were chatting about just the way the internet’s evolved. I had the opportunity to meet Tim Burnes Lee.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, the Godfather.

[00:15:48] Wes Tatters: The Godfather of the internet. And listening to Tim talking about his dream of the internet and the worldwide web, this was a worldwide web conference seven, which was back before WordCamps. It was, that was what a WordCamp looked like before it was WordPress. And I look back and I was thinking, and I’m going, there were some serious names at that event. Tim Burnes Lee was there. James Gosling, the founder of Java, was there.

And these were guys doing for the want of a better WordCamp style sessions, chatting about these ideas they’ve had. Seeing even then that what the worldwide web, and what we’ve grown into with WordPress had the potential to be, was entirely different to the way the world thought before that.

I remember there was like, I think it was the Friday night. I actually ran the media for that particular conference, that was held in Australia. It was the first time being held out of the northern hemisphere. But no fully explained reason, it was being held in Australia, in my hometown, and I ran all the media for it.

And I remember some guys, they had this sort, they were going to create this shoe library, it was like, this is the early web. Who knows what we’re going to do with it? We want a shoe library.

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: A shoe library, yeah.

[00:17:01] Wes Tatters: They taking photographs of people’s shoes, and I remember it was like 7:30 on a Friday night, and Tim’s in a pair of slacks and a t-shirt. Taking his shoes off so that they could photograph his shoes, so that his photograph of his shoes could go into the shoe library.

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: Of course.

[00:17:20] Wes Tatters: And this is the guy that invented the thing that we all live on. This is the father of everything we do today. But even then, he was this amazingly humble person, that was happy to have a chat with a bunch of kids and take photos of his shoes. It’s a different world.

[00:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: When you are where you’re at. So in the year 2025, we’re concerned about the internet now. And so the way it ended up is how it now is. And honestly, it’s not one of those things that you pick apart, as like what is the history? What were the dominoes that fell to make the internet, what it now is?

Like, history, politics and warfare, and all of those kind of things get dealt with by historians. The migration of people over great land masses, all of the kings, queens, all of that.

But this, this kind of doesn’t, and it’s fascinating to listen to you there, because it feels like it could have gone in so many different directions. Maybe would’ve been a more AOL type thing, where everything was closed and you had to buy into AOL, and everything was handled by AOL. It didn’t turn out that way. Open won. I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t swing back to closed with things social media?

[00:18:29] Wes Tatters: One of the things that caused that was the people who started using the technology that DARPA invented first, and it was universities.

[00:18:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. That was the client base, wasn’t it? It was the academics.

[00:18:44] Wes Tatters: It was the academics. So Tim’s original agenda was to obviously create a way to communicate with all the scientists in Cern what was happening in the accelerator that was sitting under three countries. Even then it was about community and communication. But as it’s walked forward, I look at the whole journey of the internet and at every point community has been a part of that.

The ability to share things. The whole basis of what we have today in open source, moving towards WordPress, is about communication. So you can’t have open source without a group of people coming together to collaborate on a project as large as WordPress, or as large as, Linux or as large as Drupal, or as large as all of these other projects. And they’re not being paid for the most part.

They’re doing it because of community, and the underlying technology behind that obviously is the internet. And more insignificantly since then this thing called the World Wide Web that Tim originally envisaged as a tool for sharing.

[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But just tool for sharing with a handful of academics, and then it just grew exponentially. Do you remember the first time that the internet became more social. No, let me rephrase that. Do you remember when the internet shifted from something which a few people did? To something where, not the majority, but it was like hard to ignore at that point. Because definitely as a child have a of no internet.

[00:20:20] Wes Tatters: Done badly, but Microsoft MSN. Windows 95 was the watershed. So Windows 95 launched, and for the first time, anyone, in inverted commas, with a modem didn’t need to know someone at a university. Didn’t need to know how to hard wire AOL to connect to something else. They could literally go get me on the internet, and it happened. So that was the watershed moment.

Now, MSN as a platform also was heavily driven by community. And again, like it or love them, the original version of Messenger, an embarrassing mess, but it started the concept of community. The original version of MSN was a place where you could go and chat. Their design philosophies around. I remember, in Australia, 9 MSN was, the branding of it. 9 here is our major television network, and they partnered with MSN, in Microsoft and Australia and our major telco to bring MSN to Australia. But it was heavily geared around building communities. And I was quite active in that MSN community in Australia.

We used to do things like popular TV shows would go to air, and then we would host forums where the actor, or the presenter, or someone from the show would hop literally straight off, the show would end at 9:30, and they would be in a forum going, and hey, tonight we’ve got insert name of whoever it is.

And people could ask them questions. And we curated it. I was a part of the curations team at 9 MSN at that stage. And, again, it was using this crazy technology to build community, and to expand communities.

Now for that network they were using as just obviously a marketing tool, but what it was doing underneath it was again, building this ethos of communities and spaces.

We then have obviously Facebook that took that and ran with it in crazy directions, and commercialized it. But underneath it we’re still this open source thing. There’s still whole open source community.

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember the moment as well when the internet went more from a consumption kind of thing? So you know, you would log onto somebody else’s property, MSNs Messenger or whatever it may be. I do remember that, by the way. To I can own a bit of the web, a bit of that whole thing can be something that I am in control of. And now we move towards CMSs I guess.

[00:22:51] Wes Tatters: So this is probably 98 initially. So we were still writing books and Netscape was still trying to work out what they were doing in the world. And, Tim was, Tim was out telling people how big the internet could be. And I remember lots and lots of people, as I said, James Gosling’s come down, Tim Berners Lee’s come. The BBC had flown two camera teams, journalists, The Times had flown out people. NBC and CBS had flown out camera crews and to be at this event. Because Sir Tim was becoming Professor Tim at that stage. He was being reordered, a honorary doctorate from an Australian university. It was a big event.

Could not get a single Australian broadcaster to even show up. Now, put this in perspective. I knew them all. I was actually in that industry. I knew the people. I literally was on the phone to news directors going, dude, just send me one cameraman. Oh, what’s this thing? What’s this thing? It was the internet.

So 95 to 98, it was still a bit hokey. I think where it really started to change though is when things like WordPress started to arrive. Because before that my books on how to build a website, I love meeting people and go, I think I’ve got your book on a shelf somewhere. It was, and it was always either mine or Laura Lemay’s.

Laura and I were both writing in parallel for the same publisher. And some of her chapters are in my books, my chapters in her books. But then it was, we were still hacking HTML. If you wanted to use JavaScript, it wasn’t jQuery or anything like that. You were writing lines of code and hoping it worked.

And there were some predecessors and other things. Microsoft had to go at the same thing. Microsoft released a product called ASP, a little thing that.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that’s right. Active Server Pages.

[00:24:35] Wes Tatters: Yeah, and then they released a thing called asp.net, and this wonderful new programming language called C#. And that was their push into this community space. They released open source product with it. They released a product which was called I Buy Spy Portal, which was eventually then forked into a product by a guy named Sean Walker to become a product called DotNetNuke, which was literally their version of WordPress.

I was there, I know Sean. I was in that space, and we were building communities again, coming outta the Microsoft space on DotNetNuke. At the same time, this little thing called WordPress was happening in parallel. At that stage, ironically, at that stage, I think DotNetNuke was actually more a CMS than WordPress was. Because WordPress was still really a blogging tool. It was still really MySpace for people who actually had a desire to code a bit.

But I think it was then, that WordPress journey, the arrival of a mechanism that did two things. It allowed you to create a website without knowing how to code, and it allowed you to become a part of something, a community online, where you could all of a sudden reach out of your local neighborhood, your local city, your country, into the rest of the world. And take things to the rest of the world. Sell products to the rest of the world. Communicate to the rest of the world. Share your opinions and thoughts. In the past, you could do that on CompuServe. You could do that on America Online. But in all those places, you didn’t own your content.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right, exactly that.

[00:26:18] Wes Tatters: Even MySpace, sort of like the predecessor to almost Facebook. Facebook groups and forums. None of these spaces you owned your content. And so I think WordPress in its initial incarnation, a blog, was a way for people to start expressing their feelings. And the concept of blogging. And then we started to grow that how do we get our blog to the world? Well, RSS feeds, and then aggregators, and then this wonderful thing called Google came along.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Discoverability.

[00:26:47] Wes Tatters: Discoverability, and visibility. And all along that journey, there’s this guy in the states beavering away, we’re talking about Matt, with a vision of what WordPress could be in that space. And he was creating that in parallel to these communities starting to emerge, to these other companies like Google, and Facebook building closed enclaves.

Where Matt, obviously very passionate about open source, had a philosophy to build this space that people could use, that people could communicate and share. It was incredibly open. Anyone could write a plugin. Anyone could write a theme. Anyone could decide that they wanted to commercialize that space by selling their theme or selling their plugin.

Hosting companies could host that platform. So the fact that was such an open product, tweaked something in the consciousness of the time. It tweaked something in that desire to communicate, but also I guess a concept of freedom to communicate.

Freedom of speech is a passionate position of a lot of countries. The right to freedom of speech, and to a certain extent the right to express an opinion, safely. Or in some cases the rights to communicate in communities.

I discovered during Covid that the platform that Rapyd grew out of Buddy Boss, which is a social media platform creation tool for WordPress. Install Buddy Boss and you’ve got your own private Facebook.

We discovered that there were communities using Buddy Boss to communicate things to their people that they were terrified to communicate on private spaces, like social media or Facebooks. I know people specifically in some of those communities, doctors, other frontline groups and organizations that were facing the real challenges of what was happening in Covid and impacts of those things. They were able to use that gift of community, freely given, freely shared, where you own your raw data in ways that I hadn’t even considered.

And for reasons that I hadn’t even considered. And each time I look at it, people find ways to use community creatively and in incredible ways. And we find that at the core of WordPress.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we really do. I remember the first time I ever produced anything online, and it wasn’t with a CMS, it was just HTML. There was no CSS at the time, it was just tables and things. But I remember publishing that, a friend of mine knew more than I did, and he said, okay, here’s the environment. Here’s the text file. Just write it in there and, I’ll click a button and it’ll go to some server.

And then I saw it, saw it on his computer. And then I said to him, but it’s on your computer. And he said, no, no, no, if you go home, it’ll be on that computer well.

[00:29:44] Wes Tatters: And if, you go down the library, or you go up the road, and all you needed to know was where it was.

[00:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: And I remembered this profound feeling of, what the heck. That’s so amazing. What, I just put something on your computer, and now anybody in the world should they, discoverability is the big problem, but they could find it. He’s yeah, that’s it. That’s what the internet basically is. And I remember thinking, gosh, what a force for good.

[00:30:10] Wes Tatters: Huge force for good. Unfortunately, it’s also been a force for other things. I had a conversation with Tim, as a part of a set of interviews that the BBC were doing, this was in 1998. And at that stage, Tim was just exploring the idea of what he called the semantic web, which was zaml, and underlying metadata. And what Tim always envisaged the worldwide web should be, he always envisaged that every page, because he’s a data scientist, he envisaged that every page would have a beautiful set of metadata and structures, so that it could be searched and indexed.

Of course that’s everything the worldwide web didn’t become, respectfully. We have enough trouble in the WordPress space remembering to put a, an alt text on a photo that we upload. But his envision was of this beautiful semantic web. So it hasn’t gone exactly the same way as he envisaged.

But even without that semantic web, the additions and add-ons of things like Google, and Google search, and the ability to create an index, a massive index of the web. And now in 2025 going, hey, ChatGPT, can you just tell me the answer to this question please? And then can you write me a presentation?

I was having a meeting with an associate of mine. I haven’t caught up with each other for about six years, and he’s deeply involved in the concept of human centered design, which is, a business practice where you, look at the customer to identify the problem. Not look at the business and try to solve a problem.

He wanted to know about what I was doing in AI and that sort of stuff. And I said, did you know that I could write you a business plan? And they used to spend a lot of money creating business plans for people, and creating sessions and seminars. And I went, I can write you a seminar structure and plan in two minutes, on any topic.

I said, no, we’ll do better. Hey, ChatGPT, tell me what you know about human-centered design and why it’s good. And of course it printed out 20 paragraphs. And then I went, can you summarize that for a presentation seminar? And of course it did that. And then I said, now can you give me the structure of the seminar?

And it did that. And this guy sitting there going, are you kidding? And I said, that’s where we’ve come. But underlying all that is data and information. And none of that’s of any relevance unless you’ve got a community to share it with.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a sense that the internet has gone in a, I’m going to use the word bad or poor direction over the last decade? Do you have a sense that mistakes have been made? If you could rewind the clock, were there any moments in time where you think, I wish it hadn’t have gone in that direction?

Because I often think things like proprietary platforms that kind of want to put a wall around the conversations that we have. They seem like, maybe in 50 years time when we look back, maybe they’ll seem like missteps. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll carry on and it’ll all be, as it is now.

But it does feel like there’s a resurgence more to owning your own conversation. So obviously we do that in WordPress, but it does feel like there’s a bit of a groundswell towards more federated protocols. Things like the AT protocol that Bluesky are doing, but Mastodon and an ActivityPub and those kind of things.

[00:33:12] Wes Tatters: I think again, if you harken back to Tim’s semantic web and, he wrote a document, 2022 I think, which was 30 years on. And he talked about where things had gone. I can tell you right now that the way I read Tim’s take on the worldwide web is that e-commerce was not a part of it. That was not a part of his idea of.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, how would you even have conceived that?

[00:33:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, e-commerce wasn’t a thing. I don’t truly think, Snapchatting or no fully explained reason, 15 second videos in TikTok were anywhere on the radar, because there was this whole deal of philosophy. But each of these things actually has the same underlying traits.

It’s all about communities, it’s all about relationships and building relationships with people. Where I think personally we have made a misstep is in how our younger generations consume that community.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot.

[00:34:12] Wes Tatters: Well, it’s more than a lot. There was a survey done and I haven’t got the figures in front of me, because I wasn’t planning on discussing where we were here. That’s looked at the level of loneliness of people in 2025, compared to the level of loneliness of 20 and 30 years ago. And it directly related this online community thing. The, unfortunately, what do we call false community sometimes. The people we have never met that we talk to in a Snapchat or something like that, that are not community, and they’re not really our friends.

And there is an increase in loneliness. And I think if there’s any misstep that we as a society have maybe taken out of this thing, is a lack of understanding of the impacts of loneliness. And I think the internet’s to blame for that.

[00:35:13] Nathan Wrigley: The internet is so beguiling, isn’t it? Because there’s so much interesting stuff there. I think throw the mobile phone into that equation as well. This always on device, which is available 24 7. But it’s that capacity, incapacity, to put it down. You start doing something with it and then five minutes later you realize, often, in many cases, five minutes is not even the benchmark. More like an hour or something.

[00:35:36] Wes Tatters: And, there are clinical reasons for that. We’re actually getting out of these devices the same dopamine hits that lead to depression. The same dopamine hits that lead to mood swings and to a certain extent mental health issues.

We now have this whole, go on the internet and you’ll get, especially when you’re hitting my age, are you dopamine deprived? Join this, get on this dopamine detox. And it’s real. It’s a real problem. And the five minutes bursts, the swiping, the scrolling, the doom, scrolling, they’re not things that you could have even comprehended. We have all this data, massive amounts of data available to it, but we prefer to consume a, TikTok video, or look at photos of funny dogs or kittens, or dogs and kittens or whatever it is. The internet and the things that have grown out of that, have all contributed to that.

[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: It really is interesting. Bit of a double-edged sword, really. Like on the one hand, the internet is probably the greatest innovation, maybe of all time. Or the electric light or, you know, what did the Romans us kind of thing.

But also, curiously, it also has aspects of it which are really deleterious to humanity, and can really bring out the worst. It allows us to consume the worst to, I don’t know, to spend hours where we probably got other things that we should be doing, but for some reason we can’t let go of the phone, and things like that. So it is really curious.

[00:37:06] Wes Tatters: It’s the speed that it’s happened.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: And continues to happen. I don’t see any slowing down.

[00:37:12] Wes Tatters: At PressConf the other day, one of the sessions was an AI session. Of course there’s going to be an AI session. Seriously, if you go to the opening of a restaurant in the town center, there’s some guy doing a presentation, and we’ve got Barry to talk about AI for 15 minutes. It feels like that anyway.

One of the demonstrations was about two paragraph script, and it said effectively, hey, insert name of AI tool. I want you to create me a five second video, and I want the five second video to be of a dinosaur running out of a valley with a volcano erupting in the background. And as the dinosaur runs towards the camera, the ground shakes and the dinosaur’s then going to pass to the right hand side. And I’d like it to look a bit like Jurassic Park. That was literally the wording, and you hit enter not that long later, here’s a 15 second video that looks lifelike, realistic.

[00:38:05] Nathan Wrigley: Jurassic Park.

[00:38:06] Wes Tatters: It literally was, you may as well have been in the feature film. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that would’ve cost couple of million dollars for that five seconds of animation. Now it’s literally something you can get on your mobile phone.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Anybody can get on their mobile phone.

[00:38:22] Wes Tatters: I was looking at a video thing today. I was like, some AI tool where you can go, hey, can you, put me in a video of me flying? Yeah, sure. I just need 10 photos of you please. And, now what would you like to fly over? Yeah, technology’s changed.

[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: Madness though, when you think about it, if you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here I am talking you through a web browser as if it’s nothing. And it is utterly remarkable.

[00:38:48] Wes Tatters: So we live in a society where we’ve moved from the first time anyone heard of a deep fake, but now it’s just what you do when you’re at lunch break.

Things are changing. Forget about the ethics, the morals, and all those things, but our technology has changed. So yeah, to answer the question, are there missteps? Probably. But the interesting thing about the internet, and it’s something that was built into it at the beginning at DARPA, it’s actually got this amazing ability in technology to recorrect itself.

And that was how DARPA was built. The whole idea was, if you can’t get it this way, it’ll go this way. And if you can’t get it this way, you’ll find a carrier pigeon, and you’ll keep the communications going. What we’ve discovered with communities, and with groups, is that they seem to have an inordinate way of self-correcting as well, through moderation, through conversations.

When you get critical mass, and you pull enough people together, there is this inordinate ability to self-correct. I don’t fully understand the psychological basis behind it, but it’s fascinating how the internet has this ability to self-correct itself. So maybe over time it will, who knows?

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly in the world at large at the moment, we do seem to be in need of some sort of self-correction in all sorts of walks of life. And the WordPress community that we are both a part of definitely has had its schism over the last six months or so.

[00:40:17] Wes Tatters: Look, and it’s been, and that’s happened before. And even those things self-correct, because there are communities that are passionate in this space. Yes, there’s been some drama. and there’s no point in having conversation about that. But one of the outputs of that has been interesting new conversations in communities. Not looking at things like how we destroy WordPress, or how we, what we do next, but actually going, how do we build our community? How do we assist our community?

So even in those sort of challenges that every big ecosystem has, the community itself can self-correct. The community itself, can develop new relationships. And people grow out of those things.

PressConf was an amazing example of that. Obviously it had happened before in a slightly different form a number of years ago, but this was, let’s put 150 odd in a space for a weekend, and let ’em all chat and have conversations. And actually have intelligent dialogues and a whole heap of things grew out of it.

When we have WordPress events, we have WordCamps. We have Word Camp Europe coming up. Groups creating new vision. We talk about things like contribution and what contribution looks like. There’s been some negatives about contribution in the recent space, but there’s also been some huge positives about contribution. Out of the drama we’ve had, actually created a new conversation. Many people who didn’t even understand the concept. Oh yeah, I just assumed WordPress was this thing. I never thought that there was actually people giving up their weekends to go to a day in Hyderabad to fix bugs in wordPress. But that’s what people do.

And it actually helped us have a new conversation with a lot of people in the WordPress space that actually hadn’t even comprehended. Because they just assumed that they were, oh yeah, I just downloaded this WordPress thing.

[00:42:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do wonder if some things will come out of the year 2025 that would’ve been in the year 2024 unimaginable.

[00:42:21] Wes Tatters: I would say I’m quietly positive. There are lots of conversations, at many layers. I do think, and this is my own personal opinion, that there is a time for speaking and a time for listening. And I think that right now there is a need for a lot of listening from disparate part of the community, and by listening I think a lot of people need to listen to what other people have to say. And then as a community, look at what all those things are. What’s being said, and look at what we do to self correct. I think it’s important to listen.

[00:43:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, a conversation which drifted through what the internet even was and is. Then finally landing on CMSs and WordPress and the community built up around that. So Wes, what a pool of knowledge you are. You’ve really done the entire internet circuit and I’m really glad that we got a chance to speak today. Thank you.

[00:43:19] Wes Tatters: Nathan, it’s been a pleasure. Always happy to chat. It’s about conversation and communities. That’s what matters at the end of the day.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, creating a successful business in enterprise WordPress, and working to foster the WordPress community.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Rahul Bansal.

Rahul is the founder and CEO of rtCamp, a large agency that specializes in enterprise grade WordPress projects. He began his journey quite differently, starting as an individual blogger back in 2006, discovering WordPress in 2007, and gradually transitioning from being a publisher to a freelance developer, before founding rtCamp in 2009.

Today, rtCamp is an enterprise grade WordPress consultancy agency operating globally and trusted by clients such as Google, Meta, Automattic, News UK and Al Jazeera.

Rahul sheds his light on working with enterprise clients in the WordPress space. Many of us are familiar with WordPress in the context of small businesses and blogging, but the enterprise space demands additional layers of security and scalability. Rahul explains the factors that set enterprise projects apart, and why meticulous code reviews, and security audits are essential when working at this level.

He talks about the opportunities in the enterprise space, recounting how rtCamp initially stumbled into enterprise level projects, not even realizing their potential until a client’s high expectations led to a decision to market themselves as an enterprise agency.

We also discussed the role of WordPress in enterprise environments, from why Gutenberg has become a credible selling point due to its powerful editing capabilities, to how the platform’s flexibility supports varied enterprise needs.

Rahul also gets into the importance of positioning. How historical context offers advantages, and the expanding market that makes WordPress a compelling choice for large clients today.

Towards the end, we explore rtCamp’s innovative intern program, aimed at growing the WordPress talent pool, and the way they’re contributing back to the WordPress project, a win-win for the business and the broader community.

If you’ve ever considered what it takes to work with WordPress at the enterprise level, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you, Rahul Bansal.

I am joined on the podcast today by Rahul Bansal. Hello.

[00:03:47] Rahul Bansal: Hello.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: It is very nice to have you on the podcast today. We’re going to talk about the enterprise, which I confess is something that I only really know about because people talk about it. I’ve never worked in the enterprise, I’ve never worked with enterprise clients. So Rahul is here. He’s very much in the enterprise as you’re about to find out, and he’s going to educate me all about that.

So Rahul, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just for a minute or two minutes, just tell us who you are, what you do in the WordPress space, where you work, your position there, and so on. A little potted bio.

[00:04:18] Rahul Bansal: Currently I am founder and CEO of rtCamp, which is a large agency specifically dealing in enterprise grade WordPress projects. I started quite differently, like I started as a individual blogger, back in 2006.

In 2007 I found WordPress. I started developing with WordPress in 2007. And slowly from being a publisher, I become freelance developer, and then around 2009 rtCamp started. So I’ve been with rtCamp for the last 16 years.

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: That’s been quite a journey. I see the name rtCamp everywhere. And we should just say, so it’s spelt, lowercase r, lowercase t, and then Camp with a capitol C, a m p. Go and Google that, and have a look at what the team over there doing.

How big has the team grown to? How many employees, staff do you have over there now?

[00:05:05] Rahul Bansal: So currently we are 230 people, all spread over.

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: That is truly an enormous agency. So bravo for growing that. That’s really incredible.

The first question that I want to ask though is, when does normal WordPress become enterprise WordPress? At what point do we cross the Rubicon where a site is, I don’t know, big enough, or your agency is working with a different type of client? Can you define what you think that means? And I’m sure that if you’re on the cusp of being an enterprise agency, this is something that, you know, may be slightly confusing.

[00:05:37] Rahul Bansal: Firstly, there is no formal definition to that. Many agencies believe they’re serving enterprise space when they’re not. Some people are actually serving enterprise space, but they don’t realise it.

So in my opinion, it’s where the requirement changes a lot. Like, for example, if we’re building a small WordPress site, which I don’t consider as an enterprise site, we will be tempted to pick first theme and plugin that matches our need, like if it works, if it gets a job done, that’s it.

But then in enterprise space, there is a lot of security and scalability concerns. These two concerns are very big. Something might be working all right, but then when you look at the code, you realise that there’s going to be a security issues, or there could be scalability issues. Many times, indy developer person, they design small WordPress plugins. They don’t have data or big enough site to test it on a large installation. So those things are not tested on really high traffic website. So enterprise can mean really high traffic website, with a lot of scalability requirement.

On the other hand, the traffic can be less, but the security requirement can be enormous. Consider the White House website. It was on the WordPress with the previous administration, and it’s again, on the WordPress with the new administration. So in both cases, I don’t think White House, like a website we can classify as a very high traffic website, but it is a very sensitive website.

It would be a lot embarrassing if that site gets hacked. So every piece of code that goes into White House website, which agency is working on it, will be thoroughly checked for security attack, for audit, for all the compliances. And this additional efforts is what makes it enterprisey, in my opinion.

[00:07:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s not necessarily the size of the client, or the fame, for want of a better word, of the client. It’s more about the kind of work that you’re doing in the background. So custom code largely, because you simply at that scale cannot have something off the shelf.

[00:07:28] Rahul Bansal: So we can have things off the shelf. The thing is, you cannot just take it and use it. You still have to own it in that sense. Like, for our clients also, we go and use many things from WordPress plugin directory. But then when we put it on this website, it is kind of like signed by us. So it’s like we have to verify, even if it is not coded by us, we have to verify line by line that it is following best coding practices, database queries will scale with high traffic, if it is a high traffic website.

There are many checks and balances in place. So no matter if you are doing in-house, like as a custom coding, or we are buying a premium plugin or using a free plugin, everything has to go through certain checks. And those checks are very expensive to do, because that’s a human labor. You have to literally go through things line by line. And in many cases, you have to put extra efforts to make it scalable with their existing system.

Because usually a large enterprise won’t use just a website in silos. It’ll be part of multiple system like authentication system, where if an employee joins a large organisation based on some rule, they might get automatic access to their website. Likewise, if they leave organisation, their access should be automatically revoked, or they have some CRM integrations, data integrations, some kind of asset, like digital asset management solution integration.

So all these have to be connected, and this all need to work together. So a lot of effort goes in doing these extra things, which are either don’t exist for small websites. So, enterprise website that I’m talking about, this can be really unknown website. We have a client which is basically a government public origin fund. Common people don’t even know about them, but they basically want pretty much all the big companies we know. Like, they have stake in all the big companies. Their asset is something like $400 billion in under management.

Most people don’t even know that company. But then it’s very sensitive because that money they’re managing is public money, it’s not like VC fund. It’s actually state reserve. Now, seriousness, we need to demonstrate in the security is very high, because if something gets hacked or somebody uploads the wrong investor report or something like portfolio report, it can have a lot of consequences.

[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: It kind of sounds to me as if the assurance that you are giving an enterprise client is basically that what we’ve built is, as far as we can tell, it’s bulletproof. We’ve gone through it line by line. We may have custom coded bits and pieces, but certainly the bits that we didn’t custom code, we are totally guaranteeing that this is going to be robust.

And also it’s sounds a bit like, if a client at an enterprise level approaches you and they say, can you do this? Your answer is yes. Basically, yes, we can do it. We can do it with WordPress. There may be a cost, but we can do it. There’s almost no scenario where a client would come to you and say, can you do this, forget the money, can you do it? The answer’s never no. The answer’s always going to be yeah, yeah, we’ll figure it out.

[00:10:15] Rahul Bansal: So that’s the thing, like if the budget has no limit then there is no limit on technology. Most often, like even where enterprise agency, WordPress has this large spectrum. So we end up with a lot of low quality leads, where somebody knocks on an enterprise agencies’ door and they really have budget constraint. They really want something really good out of the box, but they don’t want to pay for it. Or they don’t want to pay as high as it’ll require to deliver that kind of solution.

For some enterprises, budget is no limit, but then we try to be mindful of resources. For example, many enterprise agencies, including us, if you go to their GitHub account, they would have list of published themes and plugins. Most commonly plugins, themes rarely are used off the shelf. So we will build these plugins to ensure that the cost of rebuild project is less, like if we have to deliver another project, we try our best that we reuse as much as possible.

And that’s the open source spirit, that the entire WordPress committee follows. We use many times solutions that are already put in open source by our competing agencies. They also use our solution. So that’s where the enterprise solution with WordPress is also affordable. The right enterprise client that we target, usually have higher budget than we would need to develop because we are competing against a lot of experienced managers, which are very expensive, super expensive.

And when I is super expensive, I’m just talking about licensing fees. Before you hire an agency to write custom code for you, you have already paid a lot of money just for the right to use the software. With WordPress, that right to use costs zero. And then all the nice agencies in WordPress space, big, small, no matter what size they are, try their best to reuse existing solutions, to bring the cost down.

So enterprise WordPress, relatively, cost less than other enterprise CMS, but then it certainly costs a lot than building a small website. Like, you cannot go to an enterprise agency and expect in $500 your site to be built perfectly, because the requirement gathering phase, like talking to all stakeholders and understanding all the solutions they use inhouse can take like many days.

[00:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: So you may have answered this question just now with what you’ve just said. I feel that you’ve definitely gone into this territory, but it sounds like there’s a lot of line by line checking of everything. So for example, if you use a plugin off the repo, you’re going to go through that one line at a time. And you said this can be an expensive process. You’ve also said that obviously there’s benefits of using WordPress because you can take things that other people have used and so on.

But I guess at some point there’s got to be some sort of tipping point where you think, okay, WordPress is going to be good for this project, but it might not be good for that project. Is it always WordPress for you? Do you always lean into WordPress, or does there come a point where you say, do you know what, with the custom things that this particular client wants and what have you, lets just build the thing ourselves, let’s not rely on the CMS, or do you always lean in on WordPress?

[00:13:01] Rahul Bansal: Maybe it’s the nature of our positioning that we rarely get things that we cannot do in WordPress, so we always do things in WordPress. The boundary varies with how much off the shelf WordPress we’ll use, and how much custom we’ll use. In one of the project, I remember there was a specific data crunching process that we needed to build. And we felt that it’ll be better if it is built as a microservice and run independently.

So we built that in Python, but then it was talking to WordPress REST API. So that freedom we have from client, for example like that microservice, that microservice was never visible to any of the client’s editorial team. Everything they were doing, their only interface was WP admin. There was no second login or no second interface to them. It was just something was running on some server and magically data was going inside and outside WordPress.

And that’s the power of WordPress. It has so many APIs to communicate with outside world, like rest API, GraphQL, and even from the traditional XML-RPC. That WordPress can coexist with other systems very nicely. And that’s where we never face that, can we do this on WordPress or not? It’s like, can we do everything on WordPress, or do we need to put some minor things outside WordPress?

And those decisions are not the engineering limitation. Like, that microservice, we could have put it in WordPress also, but we felt that its architecture was more suited for independent microservice. That was the right call, it turned out to be right call. Much later that microservice grew independently.

[00:14:26] Nathan Wrigley: If we rewind the clock to the beginning when you were just beginning with WordPress and beginning the agency that ended up being rtCamp with your 230 odd employees, did you intend for what’s happened to happen? Did you always know that you wanted to grow something to the point where it became, air quotes, enterprise with many, many employees, or did it just evolve over time unexpectedly?

[00:14:49] Rahul Bansal: Yeah, it all happened unexpectedly. Like, I started as a professional blogger. I used to make money from advertising, affiliate marketing. So it’s like, I wasn’t doing anything remotely related to agencies.

So one thing led to another and then I started freelancing. Then even after freelancing, when I started rtCamp as an agency, because I was coming from bloggersphere, most of my initial client were bloggers, like independent bloggers. Somebody wanted a theme, somebody wanted a plugin, somebody wanted a sidebar, which sidebar just used to be a lot more popular in those early days of blogging. Like, people used to have MySpace, like experience on the web, like lots of widgets, email submission form, this pop up.

So in fact, the first enterprise client that walked into our door, that’s why I said like many agencies don’t even realise when they mingle with enterprise space. I kind of felt very irritated because they asked so many questions. They got our reference from LinkedIn. We had zero, we were not even using enterprise word anywhere in our branding, marketing, anywhere at all. But back in 2010, also, we made a good name for ourselves.

So anybody who shouted, hey, any WordPress references, our name used to pop up on social media. So we got that. And they sent us a very large procurement checklist, which we never heard of. All of our projects were like email exchange, two, three emails, money via PayPal, and emails used to be contact. Like, whatever you committed on email is the contract.

And suddenly there comes like this long PDF, Excel sheets with check boxes. Do you have a data storage policy? This policy, that policy. If we end up filling this, we’re not going make any profit with this project. So then one of my teammates said, let’s price in that. Let’s price in and see if they can afford it. So we literally added another zero to our pricing, literally like 5 times, 10 times. And we said like, hey, this is our minimum, do you want to go ahead?

I said, sure, like this is peanuts. And they were worried like, do you understand the project? You are quoting very less, your starting point is very less than our internal budget. So they came to our office, they were based in India. Luckily they were in the same city. They came to our office to audit us physically. They put like remarks like, you don’t have a fingerprint scanner in your biometric sensors in your office entry. There is no employee log.

But we are not storing any of your data. So this office is not the building where your data will reside. Your data will reside on AWS, or all those cloud servers. And then they got convinced. WordPress was very small then, and we were the only known agencies, which was fully committed to WordPress at that point. So they didn’t have choice two, three, so they kind of crossed the fingers and gave us that project.

It took six months to close. I was very pessimistic. It’s only after two, three years that we realised that they’d become our largest client by a huge margin. All my blogger friend put one side, and this single client, one side. And that revenue was growing very nicely, year on year. Renewals, they had this retainers, every year they were renewing without asking questions.

So I realise that it’s very hard to win these big clients, but once you are in it becomes very smooth journey, henceforth, like after that point. And then I think 2014 around, after two, three years data, when I saw that this client was consistently, for the last three years in a row, our biggest client. Zero sales effort, zero account issues, no negotiation on pricing, and everything was smooth.

So then I thought like we should go in to some enterprise space, and luckily around that time I had a call with Chris Lema. Chris Lema used to be available for consulting calls on Clarity. I’m not sure if that service is still around. And I still remember it was exactly 33 minutes that I talked to Chris. He repositioned rtCamp. In 33 minutes he gave me some amazing breakthrough idea.

And after that call, first time we told ourselves, we are enterprise WordPress agency from today. Until 2014 we were not identifying ourself or branding ourself as an enterprise workplace agency. That moment was the first time when we put in bold letters on our homepage, in SEO Meta, everywhere we added, we are enterprise, enterprise, enterprise WordPress.

[00:18:35] Nathan Wrigley: Can you remember that moment? So if you cast your mind back, when you added the zero and sent it, and there was obviously some suspicion in your mind that nothing’s going to come of this or what have you. Can you remember the feeling? So it’s an odd question because I’m asking you about your feelings, but can you remember the feeling when they came back and said, oh yeah, this is not as expensive as we’d imagined? That really must have opened up an entirely new world for you.

[00:19:00] Rahul Bansal: Yeah. So firstly, it was very unexpected because we were selling like WordPress projects for $100, $50, $500. The biggest was $1,000. We still remember we built a complete BuddyPress plugin for $900. And we were like so happy when that client sent us $100 tip. He rounded up to $1,000 and we were partying, like with that extra $100, we throw a party to our team.

And suddenly this client comes and they said, $5,000 is okay? Are you kidding me? Because they sent so much data I didn’t want to fill in, so I just thought, let’s just give them a number and they will walk away. We’ll not appear as a company who didn’t want to fulfill their data request. I thought, I will give them a reason to walk away, but then it didn’t walk out.

Initially I was still skeptical because they really demand too much data. Just imagine, we were like some 20 people agency at that time, and we spent three to six months in back and forth sales call. We didn’t have typical sales team at that point. Writing those long answers. We were not even understanding questions. The problem was not that we didn’t want to give data or we didn’t take security seriously, there were things that we never heard of.

It was all like foreign language to us. What are they asking? Why do they want to do that? I was not expecting lifetime revenue, that concept was not in our books then. So it was project, money in, money out, end of email, site goes live. Then the recurring revenues hosting companies. We were not into selling maintenance contract.

So it was a project kind of thinking like big, big economy mindset. So even with 5,000, I thought like, the amount of effort they’re putting us, we won’t be left with any decent margin after this project. And that was a true case. For first year there was not much margin left because they had put us through a lot of work to fulfill that project. And then we realised we underquoted after that also, because when the data, we had to talk to their Microsoft vendor. They were using Microsoft SharePoint. There were many rough edges that we had no idea could happen to us.

In year one, they were the highest revenue, but project was in loss. It’s only a year, two, three, it was very good profit. And then we have the strategy that we call now land and expand. Land big accounts, no matter whatever price point you wanted to do, go aggressive, and then once you are in, then you spread within the organisation.

[00:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh that’s an interesting insight. So land and expand. Land the client, the big fish, if you like, with the knowledge that if you maintain the relationship over many years, the profit can build up. Not necessarily year one, but maybe a bit in year two, and year three, and year four, it’s beginning to mature.

And, it sounds like such an interesting story. And, again, I’m going to rewind back to before 2014, so before you added enterprise to your website and have you. Do you think if you had begun your journey today, that you would have the same capability to expand in the same way? Because it feels like there are now quite a few players. Perhaps when you began that was less of the case. You were competing in a much less crowded marketplace.

But it feels like everybody’s intent now is to become an agency which can call itself enterprise. And I’m imagining that you got your foot in the door at a really nice time where you became a name that everybody could trust, and the recommendations come in because of prior work, but maybe that would be more difficult now.

[00:22:08] Rahul Bansal: The market is much bigger now. In fact, just imagine WordPress market share. When we were building the first initial websites, there was not even custom post types that were present in WordPress. So all the WordPress plugins, we used to do a lot of hacks. There was not standardisation. So a lot of things happened with WordPress as a platform. WordPress evolved. The market share has become so big. It’s easier to sell. We have so many examples like from White House to large publishers. And globally, it’s not like just the American companies are using WordPress. India’s second largest publisher also uses WordPress. So does Al Jazeera in Qatar.

So there are many big websites all over the world so it makes WordPress easy to sell. The market is big. There is a precedence where you can pitch somebody, this is WordPress used by so and so. I believe that no matter which lead you are dealing with, so if you have a lead from a certain industry, a certain geography, you will find a WordPress success story in their geography. You will find WordPress being used by your prospect’s competition. That makes it easier to sell WordPress.

So, yeah, the competition is more because opportunity is bigger. The pie is a lot bigger. Otherwise we would’ve stuck to the same size. Every year we are adding more people because we are able to get more work for them, even with these new agencies coming up. In fact, it’s easier to build WordPress agency, or any kind of enterprise grade agency now, because the recipe is quite clear. Because we can look at how other agencies are doing and you can take some lessons from them.

At that time we had no idea. Like, in fact, we didn’t have the idea that we should position ourselves enterprise grade agency, that was the call with Chris. Before that call, we had no idea that we should be labeling ourselves as an enterprise grade agency.

[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: If clients approach you, and it sounds like this may not be the case. It feels like people are approaching you because you build WordPress, not inquiring whether or not you would do a WordPress project for them. What are the one or two bits that you always bring out when a client says, well, why would we go with WordPress? What are the one or two top line items which you think, okay, if we’re going to build you a website, we’re going to choose WordPress, and here’s the best reasons at enterprise? So we’re not talking about a mom and pop store, that it really doesn’t matter if it goes down a bit. What are the one or two things which you bring out when an enterprise client wants to know why WordPress?

[00:24:18] Rahul Bansal: First we want to reassure them that WordPress is the right platform. So this is a difference between a product company and agency. A product has a landing page, which is more similar, it gets us to a lot of people. But an agency pitch is tailored for every client, every prospect. So our first goal is to find competition. So which are the competitors for this particular client, prospective client, and see if they’re using WordPress. If your competition is using WordPress, you will feel a lot more comfortable going after it, because nobody wants to be first, especially in large enterprises.

Another way we define enterprise is that, when you are not buying from out of your pocket. In a large organisation, your job is not to save the money or find cheapest solution, your job is to deliver result so that it can go very nicely in your annual review report. I still believe people, especially in enterprise, are looking for safety as a first because they know that they have budget to build anything under the sun.

So usually we say less like, WordPress can do this, WordPress can do that. Because for everything that WordPress or any platform doesn’t do out of the box, they have budget. What they need to know is that it’s secure, it’s safe, it’ll scale well. And if some government approaches us, so we show that public sovereign fund, that they’re managing. So that client has a special permission with us, like we cannot refer them publicly, that government agency, but we can refer them to other government agencies in private conversations. So that is how we convince like, okay, this is similar people to you who are using WordPress.

And I think safety is still the first thing that people are looking for because, it’s not even WordPress, it starts with open source. There is something, somebody did some marketing where people believe or have this misconception that open source will be easy to hack, because you can see the code, you can easily hack. That is our first step. If client mentions it explicitly, we go all in. Even if the client doesn’t mention it, if the prospect says that we are looking for rating interest, we still will verify. Are you sure that you are sorted on WordPress being safe? Any concerns, any doubts?

And then features, because WordPress has no match. And I’m not saying this as a WordPress agency. The Gutenberg editor itself alone is miles apart. If you go to any other platform, the editing capabilities are nowhere close to Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg editor demo itself is a deal breaker in many cases. We just show them Gutenberg editor, and they’re like, wow, is this possible? Is this thing real? Is this some mockup? No, this is website. After the call, we are going to send you a URL, go and try your hands on. This is no fake, that vaporware demo where you see something on my screen, but in reality it doesn’t work like that. This is the real website. Go and try it.

[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really interesting because in the non-enterprise, that message hasn’t necessarily landed. Gutenberg is, it’s very divisive issue, isn’t it? Whether you use it or not. And it’s curious that you are saying that it’s one of the key things which leads to the success.

Can you just dig into that a little bit? What are some of the aspects of Gutenberg which make the clients think, okay, this is great, this is perfect, this is just what we need? What are some of the features that you draw out of the block editor?

[00:27:19] Rahul Bansal: So I think the main difference that we feel like compared to the consumer WordPress, I would say. The consumer WordPress access technologies on very different platform, like proprietary. Just imagine somebody is using Instagram to create reels. With that mindset they come to WordPress Media Library and expect video editing experience like that to happen in WordPress, they will be disappointed.

But here we’re talking to people in large companies, very large companies, using legacy systems, probably from the nineties. They might have a desktop application to update a webpage, some ugly looking forms. We even have a memory where a client, their publishing workflow they had to write an article using a very poorly designed HTML web form, and they had to upload images via FTP. And then they had to reference images in document. There was no drag and drop interface.

So now if somebody like this person comes to Gutenberg, it’s like an iPhone moment for them. With that being said, Gutenberg itself is a very powerful editor. We haven’t come across a case where somebody said, oh, this is not flexible. As I said, like enterprise have a very good balance around the feature versus maintenance. For example, so Gutenberg may have one or two features less compared to a third party page builder, but then being part of Core, they’re assured that five years down the line, it will be very well maintained.

Security is more important to them because one less plugin means one less attack vector. Less things to break, less things to train, less things to maintain going forward. We as an agency develop so many sites on Gutenberg that we have our own libraries and our own patterns. So it’s like, whenever a requirement comes, we can easily map it to Gutenberg.

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s the difficult thing to imagine if you’ve never built your own block or you’ve never delved into patterns. But certainly at the enterprise level, if a client comes to you and said, we have this repeatable thing, and we need to put this repeatable thing on page every time. And honestly it’s real chore. And you can build a block, and they drop the block in, and now they just fill out some fields, drag an image in here, and suddenly, boom, it’s exactly on the front end what were expecting.

It’s that kind of thing, isn’t it? It’s that, almost like an app inside of an editor. So we’ve got a block which consumes perfectly the content that you want, and we can adapt it if your needs change. But if you’ve never really gotten into that, it’s hard to imagine. It’s just a bunch of paragraphs and images, but it’s not, it’s so much more powerful than that.

[00:29:34] Rahul Bansal: One thing I would say that, if you look at any large corporation, they have something called design systems, where they have their brand guidelines across products, not just websites like, across mediums like print and everywhere. With Gutenberg, it is very intuitive and easy to map the design system into WordPress. So that is where Gutenberg shines, that you can create patterns, you can create theme json. You can give them a starting point which blends very well with their existing design system.

That is where half of the job gets done. Like, compared to indie hackers or small businesses, large enterprises are not running after lots of plugins. They don’t want to try a hundred plus blocks plugin, a plugin with 200 blocks. They want to restrict number of choices. They want to have less number of blocks, but properly weighted with the user’s guidelines. So it’s like, the freedom they demand is easily given by Gutenberg, and with the assurance of, it is going to be around long term. It’ll be very well maintained. It’ll be very well supported, and performance. I still feel Gutenberg has much better performance, the markup, SEO qualities, top notch.

[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s just the constraints that you can put around that editing experience. So if the client comes and they want this inexperienced user to be able to create content but have boundaries so they can, I don’t know, they can add an image here and it will be, it doesn’t matter, they just put it in and it will output perfectly. And here’s where the text goes, but they can’t change the fonts, you’re not allowed to change the color and what have you. All of those kind of constraints around the editing experience. It’s just miraculous really what’s possible.

And I think it gets lost because the majority of people, I’m imagining using WordPress are sort of tinkering with Core blocks and it can become confusing. There’s lots of choices. You try one thing and it doesn’t work out, and you throw your hands in the air. But if you’ve built the perfect thing, then all of those guardrails are in place and it will output the perfect thing every time. I think that’s really interesting.

How do you grow, and how do you find your next employees? Because I’m guessing at the level that you are now at, you must have some fairly exacting specifications when you put out a job description. And WordPress is becoming an increasingly JavaScript based thing. Lot more technical difficulties. Where do you find your talent, and is it becoming harder to find?

[00:31:40] Rahul Bansal: This would be unique to literally us. We have what we call our own training center where we, every year we take some 50 students from college, who recently graduated. Every six months we take 25 to 30 students from colleges. We put them through six months of training, like a complete, they get paid to learn WordPress for six month. They have no obligation to continue with us. They can join our competition, they can do anything with the WordPress.

But we really get this talent and this job is very popular in India. So this training we run, the pay scales are very popular in India. So last year also we had some 90,000 applications for 60 positions. We literally have to build a platform. So we have a campus adding platform, its name is Chitragupta. Chitragupta is basically is responsible for managing the ledger of your good and bad work. So in Hindu mythology. So we built  Chitragupta, which basically scans your GitHub repos and assigns your grade.

And those 9,000 people gets graded. And then we interview from top to bottom until 60 positions gets filled. So last time we had to interview some 1,200 students, by the time 60 students got selected.

Then we put them to the six month training. Our course is public, so people know what is going to be in the course, and so we find a lot of passionate people. Many times by the time they join our course, I’ve already gone through it from the public website that we have learn.rtcamp.com. From there, they already have checked it. And then we put them through the six month training. After that, this thing we started this year only. After six month training, we put them six months into the WordPress.

So WordPress Core has a mentorship program running on for new contributors. So this year we enrolled 10 people, managed by Automattic and Google employees, senior employees. So they are mentoring this people for further. So first year we, we invest them heavily. Zero revenue, only investment in year one.

And then from year two, we start getting, like some client work done from them. And this is something turned out to be very great for us from last three years. At some point we felt, there are same number of people switching between agencies, and net new addition to the WordPress worker pool was getting stagnant, especially around Covid.

I felt the way people used to discover life with WordPress, or a professional life with WordPress was mostly through WordCamps or meetup groups, and when that Covid happened, we suddenly missed those years, when new people didn’t come to the WordPress, as many as they used to come before.

So there was this gap that started hurting large agencies, like us. Because if we look at a small website, then the enterprise budget appears a lot, but there’s always a limit. No company approves unlimited budget for any venture. Like for every project there’s a budget. It’s usually large enough, but there’s always a number and, as talent was getting more expensive, WordPress was getting unaffordable at some point.

So I talked to some medium publishers, medium sized publishers, not the big ones, who complain a lot. Like the good WordPress agencies are either sold out or too expensive. It’s like WordPress is suddenly getting unaffordable, and that is when we started in this hiding experiment, where we onboarded people every year. And this is, we are doing from last four years.

So we have been hiring for many years, but early it was 5, 10 people. This massive scale of hiring we started from last three to four years. And, it turned very well for us. Like all these people in second year clocked, like in agency billable hours is a very big metric, and in second year, these people clock 90%, more than 90% billable hours.

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: That’s incredible. What a great idea. Can I just ask, just to clarify with that, is that an in-person thing? So you come to a place where 60 people gather, and the tuition is taking place in the same room, or is it an online thing or?

[00:35:23] Rahul Bansal: So before Covid it was, it used to be in the same room, but the scale was 20 people at that time only. After Covid, we made it completely remote. It’s now completely remote. It’s still in the same time zone because, these are the Zoom calls, recordings. The time zone synchronization is needed. So that’s why it’s currently India only. But we are expanding it to other territories, and we are seeing like if we can create similar talent pool in other part of the world. Because,early it was in n office, then it went remote over Zoom. And this year, it is going async. We have a dedicated department, which is called Learning and Development Department.

So our agency head has implemented most lessons in a synced way, so that people can wake up at different time. And so it’s like they won’t get blocked. They can learn asynchronously, they can complete this six month course asynchronously.

[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: It just sounds like the appetite is incredible. The numbers that you just mentioned there, I think you said something like 1200 or something like that, people for 90 places. That’s just remarkable. So the appetite really is there. It seems like such a commendable project as well, in that you are putting out a limited, you know what, you can manage. 60 people out into the workplace. Some of them may end up working with you. Some may end up working with your competitors. But you’ve put 60 people out there who are really credible at pushing the boundaries of what WordPress can do, and hopefully just making a start on their career.

[00:36:44] Rahul Bansal: Yeah.

[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: But I know that it’s not just limited to that. And, I would like to get into this just before we finish, because I think this is important. Over the last few years we see these metrics every year of companies who put time into the WordPress project in general, in a whole manner of different ways. They may be sponsoring events. They may be committing staff to Five for the Future and what have you.

And the company, your company, rtCamp, it always seems to be right at the forefront of that in a growing way. I’d just like to applaud you for that and give you an opportunity to say what it is that you do so that we’ve got an impression of just how much good you are doing apart from obviously, having a very profitable agency and what have you, how much good you’re putting back into the community as well. So just outline your commitments to the WordPress project.

[00:37:29] Rahul Bansal: So, as I mentioned that, so we have multiple ways of contributing. So as we hire a lot of from college, unfortunately we cannot have a lot of Core committers with us, but we take care of the other end. For example, these 10 people, we have a commitmentt now internally that every six months, so we will put 10 people full-time, like full-time as in literally full-time. A hundred percent of their time will go in working on WordPress project for six months.

And then this will be rotated by next batch. So in rotation there will be at least 10 people. As we grow further, then we’ll make it 15, 20. And we want to keep this ramping up this number. So there will be always, WordPress Core will have enough junior people to pick the task. So, that good first issues will, somebody will be looking at them.

Then we have a QA people, work into the QA team, other teams. I myself as WordCamp organizer, for WordCamp Asia. We have other people contributing to different part of WordPress.

We have a training course, which is public domain, in public domain. We started that much before learn.wordpress.org is there. Now  learn.wordpress.org is there, it is much better resource. But then this course was there for many years, and many other agencies use it. So that is one of the way to build human capital. So this word actually drives me a lot. We want to consciously put our efforts in developing human capital of WordPress.

Because in the end, it’s people that do the job, no matter how fancy it is. You need a human to put a prompt to the AI. ChatGPT won’t build things on its own. You need to, you need a human to ask creative questions. And we want to ensure that WordPress economy continues to grow, and it never falls short of people. So we hire a lot of junior people. We put into the workplace. We publish our videos tutorial. We publish our training material also in the public domain.

Many companies use it, and we expect no link back, also, no credit. Because sometimes they have a apprehension that if they know, this is why rtCamp course will, for, example, our training course site doesn’t require registration. So if you’re sending your employees to learn WordPress on our site, we won’t track them. We won’t solicit them. We have no way of knowing who’s learning. Google Analytics just shows traffic. A lot of traffic is coming to those training sites, but we have no personally identify information tracked there.

[00:39:45] Nathan Wrigley: I would imagine that in every aspect of your business, except this, maybe, there’s gotta be some measurable ROI. Okay, we put this in, we get this out. Do you have any metrics to measure your commitment to the community, or is it just putting your finger in the air and thinking, okay, last year, our business did this, let’s put, I don’t know, whatever it might be. Do you have a pro forma that you stick to? A number of hours, a number of people? Or is it just, yeah, this feels right this year. Because you can’t measure this. And in some cases, I imagine people would think, yeah, they’re probably overdoing it a little bit over there and what have you.

[00:40:21] Rahul Bansal: So, we have a top line mandate that, so it’s like, internally we divide engineers in three categories in rtCamp. The junior ones were like less than two years in rtCamp. The senior ones like two to five years. And lead levels were like more than five years with us. The junior one, we target 20% of their time for WordPress Core. And the medium level, the seniors, 10%, and lead level is 5%. Lead level is very hard, because we have very less lead engineers. The demand supply gap is more evident on senior and lead level. But then, these metrics are, so our office structure is that we have some called business needs.

So every people need to submit their 20% report. Not only they need to submit the hours report, like they have their hours went into the WordPress Core or different part. They have to compile what are the issues they solved. It’s not like you’re just making time entries. You have to tell in the leadership quarterly review that I have 50 people in my business units, and together they clock 3000 hours. And this is what we achieved in 3000 hours. And this is approved. The props messages we see in WordPress Slack, those screenshots, if our employee names is mentioned, are taken screenshots and filing into those review reports.

Three people got props from my team. The WordPress Core release notes, like with major releases. So those contributor list also presented by them. If somebody’s doing some make WordPress blog post or activity, those are also tracked by them. So the heads compile this report, from like bottom ups and then present in leadership meeting. So this is not accidental.

The material ROI is very hard to measure. We cannot say that, oh, we made like X dollars because of this effort. I think, as a salesperson, when I tell a client like, hey, I’m going to give you an engineer who knows WordPress very well. I’m more confident if that person has contributed six months to the WordPress Core. And their patches is weighted by some amazing people in WordPress community, especially senior ones. It’s like a win-win situation for all. This gives me a very, very well trained people to sell.

[00:42:16] Nathan Wrigley: That’s exactly how I was just thinking about it. This kind of win-win cycle of you put people into WordPress, and obviously at a junior level, more time and I can understand that. That makes sense. Presumably the ones who are more experienced, they’ve got other work to be doing. But also they’ve probably gained a ton of experience doing those prior years of extra hours.

So you put the hours in, but also they contribute to Core, but they get experience back out. They’ll be exposed to all sorts of different things that your projects would never have put them in front of, presumably. So they’ll be touching on subject matters. Getting into plugins, themes, blocks, code, Core, whatever it may be in a whole range of different ways than they would be. So like you say, it’s like you slap my back, I’ll slap yours a little bit. Win-win. WordPress wins, you win.

[00:43:06] Rahul Bansal: There are three wins here. The person, that student, who came right out of the college, and usually in college, people here, people have some negative perception about professional life. That companies are evil. You are going to do labor. Somebody will steal your credit, and here they’re on their own. Like they go into the WordPress community on their own. They sign a patch with their name. They file a Trac ticket with their name. They get props in their name. They get treated very well by contributor. If somebody makes mistakes, WordPress committee is full of nice people. Nobody’s going to pull them down. Nobody’s going to shout at them.

Everybody corrects them with respect and compassion, and that helped them grow as a person. Like, they become better human. They become better coder. And that empathy, we see that, when they become senior engineers, and when they’re reviewing some junior’s code, they remember that, hey, when I was, it was my first day in WordPress community, and I made that patch. I made one mistake, but somebody was nice to me, so I have to pass it on. So that niceness cycle continues.

And, the biggest win is that these people like, who has an incredible job satisfaction. They love open source more. Many of them don’t join for the love of open source, they’re at a point when they, join rtCamp, they’re at a point when their college is ending. They just want to get a job, and secure a financial life. Whatever jobs comes their way, they’re okay with it. Open source, closed source, not much preference. But once they’re in, and then we take them through this one year of tour, like six months in training center, then six months in WordPress community, they become the advocate of open source for life.

And that is a very most important win for us because we want people to believe in open source. We don’t want them to say open source is good because their company is selling it. We want them to have that faith that open source is the right way to do things. And that faith is very important for growth. You cannot mug up your mission statement and stand for it.. You have to believe in something to stand for it.

[00:45:00] Nathan Wrigley: What a profoundly interesting thing to have said. I think that’s just fabulous. I think your company is doing so many interesting things. It’s obviously, financially it’s working out, but just the position that you’ve painted there of the way that you are treating your employees, and the autonomy that you’re giving them, and the future opportunities that you are giving them. And the training opportunities giving them, just remarkable. And I’m profoundly impressed by what you’ve been doing.

Unfortunately, time is our enemy. We’re going to call it a day there. Rahul, thank you so much for chatting to me today. That has been an incredible journey. Long may it continue. I wish you and rtCamp all the success that you can possibly have the future.

[00:45:39] Rahul Bansal: Thank you, Nathan. Thanks for having me on this podcast.